


2984

by SteinShipping61



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Bottom Kaiba Seto, Dystopia, Inspired by 1984 - George Orwell, Kaiba Seto Has Issues, Kaiba Seto Needs a Hug, M/M, Transhumanism, Yami Yuugi | Atem Has His Own Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:40:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 26
Words: 48,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22898140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteinShipping61/pseuds/SteinShipping61
Summary: Hidden away in the broadcasting office of Kaiba Corp Industries, Seto Kaiba skillfully rewrites the truth to suit the needs of the company. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-invasive cybertech made popular by transhumanism. In his longing for truth and liberty, Kaiba begins a secret love affair with a coworker, Yami Mutou, but soon discovers the true price of freedom and betrayal.(Prideshipping)Inspired by 1984.
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Seto & Yami Yuugi, Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi, Puppyshipping, prideshipping - Relationship
Comments: 33
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

_It's easier to rule with love than hate, provided nobody knows that love is conditional._

~~~

It is a bright cold day in April, and the clock strikes thriteen. Seto Kaiba, his chin resting on his steepled hands, rises at the sound of a knock on the door. He opens it to leave his office, but the hallway outside is empty.

The hallway smells of stale bleach. He walks down the hallway, at one end a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, has been tacked onto the wall. It depicts simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man about fifty-five, with a heavy black-greying moustache and imperious features. Seto makes for the stairs. It's no use trying the lift. Even at the best of time it's seldom working and at present, the eelctrcity is cut off during daylight hours. It's part of the eceonomy drive in preparation for Battle City Memorial Week.

He walks home.

His personal flat is seven floors above his office and Seto, who's 17 and has an aversion to consuming anyrthing other than coffee, walks swloly, making use of the rest landings. On every landing, opposite the lift doors, the face gazes at him from another poster on the wall. It's one of those pictures that are so contrived that the eyes follow him around when he moves. GOZABURO KAIBA: THE FOUNDER OF LOVE, the caption beneath it runs.

Inside his personal flat a drilling voice reading out a list of figures which have something to do with the price of stock. The voice comes from a flatscreen TV, curved, 3D and which spans from one end of the wall to the other with its blaring hyper-saturated colouration. Seto uses his bleeper to turn it down, but the words are still distinguishable. The instrument (the cyber-screen, is it's name) can be dimmed, but it cannot be shut off completely. He moves over to the window: the gharish thinness of his emaciated body only accentuated by the suit which hangs off his shoulders. His hair is very straight and is growing ever longer, his face naturally hollow, his skin dryer than a dehydrated desert from its fragility against the bitter winter wind.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looks cold. There seems to be no colour in anything except the posters that are plastered everywhere. The black-moustachioed face haunts him from every commanding corner. There's one on the house-front immediately opposite his own building. GOZABURO KAIBA: THE FOUNDER OF LOVE, the caption reads, while dark eyes look deep into Seto's own. A helicopter snoops in the distance, the police patrol that looks into people's windows routinely. But the patrols don't matter. Only the Thought Police matter.

The cyber-screen still babbles away about stocks and the overfulfillment of the Nith Three-Year Plan. It receives and transmits simultaneously. It'll pick up any sound Kaiba makes above the level of a very low whisper. Moreover, provided he remains in this room, it watcHes and records him 24/7. However, he knows all that which is more than most people. Because it's his company that manufactures, designs and implements these 'on behalf of' the state. If only they knew, KaibaCorp and its investors _are_ the state. He, and everyone else, lives on instict that you are always being scrutinised.

Seto keeps his back turned to the cyber-screen. It's safer but as he well knows, even a back can be revealing. Just a few floors above his place of work, he regards the placement of his apartment with vague distaste - this is Domino, chif city of Blimp KC-12. He tries to force out some childhood memory that tells him Domino was always like this. Was there alwys this vistax of rotting 27th-century houses? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirls in the air? But it's no use, he can't remember: nothing is left of his childhood exceot brief monochrome dictations of fragmented days in the orphanage, seemingly arbitrary.

Kaiba Corp - KC, in newspeak - is different from any other building against the skyline. It's an enormous pyramidal structure of nebulous blue two-way glass soaring, three-thousand feet into the air, with 400 floors. Looking out the window, Seto is able to see the tips of large, 30-foot letters embedded on the side.

CONTROL WITH LOVE

DESTROY ALL HATE

DOUBT ALL DOUBTS

Kaiba Corp contains, as it's rumoured, 400,000 rooms above ground-level, and just as many below. Seto knows it's closer to 1,000 each way.

It's the underground floors that are really frightening. There's no way to see the floors, the rooms. Even Seto hasn't seen them, nor has he been below Floor 50 since he first arrived at the age of 12. You can't go underground anyway except on offical business and then only by penetrating through eye-retina scans, fingerprint and pulse-reading tech, and a laser code. You get all 3: neglect one, and you never come back. Even the first 10 floors above-ground are roamed by armed robots.

He's sure Gozaburo programmed them to beat him on sight.

Seto turns quickly. His expression is set to quiet optimism as it always is when facing the cyber-screen. He crosses the room to the tiny kitchen. As always, it's empty of food and he sacrificed his lunch to finish a paper. From the shelf, he takes down a bottle of unbranded _VODKA_. It smells of nothing until you really concentrate, and then it's the same bleach that hits him when he descends to his office. Seto stills himself, pouring a shot before gulping it wirh an intense shock.

Instantly, his throat tightens so much he can't breathe. It tastes like bleach as much as it smells like it. The next instant, the burning dies down like a quiet fire and the world looks more cheerful. He takes a cgarette from the unbranded pack marked _CIGARETTES_. Seto wanders back into the living room and sits down at a small table that sits just to the left of the cyber-screen.

From the table-drawer he reveals a quill, a bottle of ink and a black book that's falling apart. These items are from the last millenia.

Probably because this used to be Gozaburo's room, the cyber-screen is placed oddly. Usually it encompasses wall from floor to ceiling with its camera in the centre. But in this house, the camera is bumped slightly below the top-edge of the screen. That means that at one end of the camera is a blind spot at the end of the table where Seto now sits. The cyber-screen can still hear him but so long as he sits at this table, he cannot be seen.

This kind of book couldn't have been made fewer than 500 years ago, preserved in this drawer until some neglectful employee sold it to Gozaburo who was similarly neglectful in exploring it. As soon as Seto saw the contents of this drawer, he was overcome with desire to write. Members of Kaiba Corp aren't supposed to write (they're supposed to type, there's a mandatory cybernetic augmentation to the fingers of low-level employees to prevent the action of writing) but such a rule isn't enforced for management level. At first, he'd written with no express purpose.

Writing isn't illegal (there are no laws, of course it isn't) but writing as a member of KC would be punished.

A quill is arachaic, was apparently so even 900 years ago. But ink remains easy to procure in the Dark Market, the lift on a neglected floor, number 307 upon which there is no camera either because they haven't bothered to replace the broken cyber-screen. Seto dips the quill into the ink and hovers it above the page. His blood runs cold. To write is a decisive act of defiance. One that makes him falter.

_ April 4th, 2984 _

Seto sits back. A sense of complete helplessness has descended upon him. For one, he isn't even sure it is 2984. It must be around then, because he's sure he's 17 and that means he was born around 2967 or 2968. but nowadays there are no birth records, date records. It's impossible to know any date within a 5-year window.

Who will read his diary? The question suddenly occurs to him. The future. The unborn. Whoever inherits this apartment and subsequently this table. He hovers for a moment over the doubtful date on the page and them remembers a word from the dictionary of newspeak: doublethink. He is writing for the future, and that overwhelms him. Yet it's impossible to communicate with the future. If the person who inherits this place is the same as him, they won't need his words nor will they trust him. If they aren't, this book will be destroyed upon finding it.

For a while, he stares stupidly at the paper. He's curious when he lost the power to express himself, and even forgotten what he intended to say. He's been working up to writing this for weeks and now he realises that writing isn't easy. But he has a constant, unending monologue constantly running in his head. All he has to do is transfer that to paper. Why is it so hard? But right now, even the monologue is inaccessible, trapped deep in his subconscious by the fear of his own defiance. All that he accesses is the blank page.

He writes in sheer panic, anticipating a bullet flying through his skull any second, having been caught in this illicit act.

_ April 4th, 2984 (or thereabouts) _

_Last night I went to Floor 112. Watched the networks - war updates. Some refugees were bombed somewhere in Post-Ottoman. They swam for the shore, but the news crew caught the bombs they dropped, and the carnage left behind in the ocean. As much as a beached whale. 5 people, 6 people. Everyone laughed, and I laughed with them._

_Then there was the children. A toddler screaming in his mother's arms as she screamed too. She held him close as if she could protect him, yet she was defenceless herself. But they were splattered too, and everyone gasped. It wasn't funny anymore, but the audience were captivated by the dramatic flair of the shots. Everyone clapped, but someone started complaining. Saying they shouldn't show such things in front of the children of the company members, and covered her own kids' eyes. She was led away by robots but I don't suppose they punished her badly. Her reaction was typical of liberals._

Seto stops writing, partially because he's suffering from cramp. He doesn't know what makes him pour out this stream of fragmented thought. But writing this reminds him of another memory tucked away in the back of his mind. Was it from this morning?

_It happened when the clock struck eleven. They sat everyone in the centre of the room by the big screen, as they gabbed in excitement anticipating the Duel Monsters Tournament. It was live, or at least they said it was. hey say everything is live, but there's no way they could make the cameras change angles so quickly and still capture a live event as it happens._

_I was taking my seat when someone I know by sight came onscreen. I don't know his name, but I know he works in the Entertainment Department, I've seen him on the screen a few times and he's the company's 'best duelist', apparently. He's a bold-looking man about 16, with spiked dark hair, a tanned face and confident, prideful countenance. A belt around his waist, the emblem of the Anti-Sexuality League, was wound tightly around his waist. I had disliked him from the moment I saw him. I know why._

_It's because of the image of glamour and celebrity he carries as a duelist. I hate all duellists, especially the best ones. It's always the duellists who are the most bigoted members of KaibaCorp. But this particular duelist felt more dangerous than most. I met him once off-screen, in the corridor. He looked at me and in that moment, I was terrified. The idea even crossed my mind that he might be an agent of the Thought Police. Unlikely but still he makes me feel uneasy._

_A 13 year old man (though I suspect he is much older, yet kept this way artificially) sat beside me, a member of the Board. Noa Kaiba, the holder of some position so important that I have only a vague idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the crowd when his commanding presence approached. Noa is a short man not fully grown, with transhumanistic augmentations, including a breathing machine to increase lung efficiency. In spite of his mint-green hair and childish features, he projects the hubris of someone untouchable. I have seen Noa perhaps a dozen times since I arrived here at the age of 12. I am foolishly drawn to the hope that Noa's political orthodoxy isn't perfect. Something about him suggest this unmistakably. He has the appearance of being a person I can talk to, if somehow I can cheat the cyber-screen and get him alone. But there's no way to verify this._

_The next moment, the booming voice of Yami Mutou declared itself through the screen. His face appeared. The duel started. Opposite Yami on the TV screen was a pale man with long, white hair. Under him, a banner read 'The Enemy of the People'. Everyone growled, retched in disgust. Nobody remembered who he is, if they ever knew him. But that didn't matter: he was now the enemy. The man shuddered, gripping a deep wound in his arm, the arm that brandished his duel disk._

_The duel disk is a mechanism of my own invention, yet amendments were made to it afterwards. I invented it as holographic gaming technology, however it is now an instrument of terrible death. One your lifepoints, the counter on the duel disk, reach 0, the disk sends an electric current of 1,000,000 volts through your body. That is the punishment given to infidels by the state._

_I watched, on the 'live' screen, as Yami delivered his punishment. They duelled, but as the duel began he became weary very quickly. He fell, shaking, begging for mercy. Yami showed none. The duel wasn't fair: none are. The same way the archaic system of capitalism was deemed unfair and revolted against. One thing I could tell is that his face is unlike ours: like those of Londonists. The Londonists who took over their half of the world in the 17th century, the London Empire which we are, and have always been, at war against._

_I have never seen a Londonist outside of these duels, but this is the weakest one I've seen._

_During the duel, the crowd around me erupted in a rage. The enemy was the object of fear and hatred from our people, moreso than the race of Londonists themselves. Their race brought rage among us inherently, yet no matter how often their theories and claims are refuted, smashed in every media update, the Thought Police continue to capture his vast army of spies, lurking in the shadows of this city and inside KaibaCorp._

_There are also whispered stories of a book. A terrible book, compiled of the heresies of the Londonists and their false narrative of history. They claim they used to be called Caucasians, or Britons, or Europeans. But no such races exist, and neither have they ever existed. We refer to it simply as_ the book _._

_Finally, the raging crowd were leaping up from their seats and screaming, cursing, trying desperately to drown out the cries of the Londonist, and singing their reverent praises to Yami. Even Noa Kaiba had turned bright blush, sitting in his chair and breathing heavily into his machine, chest rising and falling with the force of a dam against a wave._

_I realise_ _d_ _that I was shouting along with the others, violently kicking the rung of my chair. The thing about watching duels is, that while one does not feel obligated to join in, it is impossible not to join in. A hideous ecstasy of hate flows through crowds, the desire tov rage, to hate, to torture, to murder in cold blood._

_Yet the rage we all felt is always undirected. The pretense of the enemy is unnecessary, the rage remains whether he is there or not. It could switch between one object to another and for a moment, I found my rage directed at Gozaburo Kaiba, at the Thought Police, and at myself. And I felt so, so sorry for the man onscreen being electrocuted to death before my very eyes._

_Then, Gozaburo Kaiba appeared onscreen, like a saviour form the hate. He calmed the crowd with his voice. Not with the words he said, but the very fact he was saying them. The hate diminished and a rhythmic chant of his name traversed through the crowd._

_I caught Noa's eye during the chant. And I knew - yes, I knew! - that Noa was thinking the same thing as myself. He felt my hatred, my frustration, my disgust. This ignited my hope that not everyone in KC are brainwashed. I am not the only enemy._

_Perhaps Noa is one of the rumoured spies! The conspiracies are true after all, how wonderful that would be. But it's impossible to ensure they aren't only a myth. Some days I believe in it, some days not. There is no evidence, only fleeting glances that might mean anything or nothing._

The vodka in Seto's stomach makes his hand stop, finally hitting him with the force of a tsunami. His eyes become unfocused. He writes now on autopilot: 

_DOWN WITH GOZABURO KAIBA_

_DOWN WITH GOZABURO KAIBA_

_DOWN WITH GOZABURO KAIBA_

Seto writes over and over, filling a page. He feels a shock of panic, which is absurd since writing this is no more dangerous than the initial act of opening the book was. For a moment he is tempted to abandon the book, to destroy the pages. 

But that would be useless. Even if he stop writing, even if he had never written down - he would still have committed the most heinous crime that contains all others. Thoughtcrime. 

Thoughtcrime can never be hidden, they'll inevitably get him for it. The arrests happen at night, but how many there are is unknown, as there are never official arrest reports, or any trial. People simply disappear, always at night. Their names are removed from the register. Every record of them and everything they have ever done is removed. 

For another moment, Seto writes in hysteria. 

_I don't care. They'll shoot me, I don't care. Down with Gozaburo Kaiba. They always shoot you in the back of the head, they'll shoot me in the back of the head. Down with Gozaburo Kaiba._

He sets down the pen. There's a knock at his door, startling him violently. 

They're here already! He sits still, in silence. Hoping however it is might go away after a single attempt at knocking. But no, they knock once again. 

Internally, he screams. et his face remains expressionless as he hides his notebook and walks to the door. 


	2. Chapter 2

_Mutually assured destruction doesn't work if one of you has nothing to lose._

_~~~_

Seto draws a dep breath and rips open the door, prepared to be dragged away in handcuffs. Instantly, a wave of relief flows through him. The short child standing by his door jumps into his arms, gripping him in a tight hug. He buries his head into Seto's side.

"Big brother!" he cries out with a choked sob. "I thought I heard you come in. I miss you!"

'Brother' is a word that members of Kaiba Corp are not supposed to use. Everyone is 'colleague'. But with some people, like his younger relative Mokuba, it's used instinctively.

"Come and visit me, please? I haven't seen you in forever!"

Mokuba is a short child, more emaciated than Seto. His hair is black and long, flowing down his back in long, messy strands. He's 12, but one think he's much older upon meeting, even with his childish looks. His maturity and depth of knowledge offset the notion that he's a child.

Seto follows him down the passage, to the floor of KC Headquarters directly below his.

Mokuba's flat is even smaller than Seto's without compartmentalised rooms, and dingy in a different way. Everything has a battered, haphazard look as if a hurricane ravaged the flat. Computer parts - wires, glowing monitor screens, blinking routers - lie everywhere. The walls are adorned with posters of Gozaburo Kaiba. Scattered cross the table are homemade electronic monitors and keyboards.

"Sit! I got new chairs," Mokuba gestures to the seat opposite him, and sits down. "I haven't seen you in forever!"

Mokuba has the habit of exclaiming each sentence of his. 

Seto hates sitting in the presence of others, but takes a seat anyway. Sitting is always liable to make his bones crack.

"I've drawn up some new duelling strategies that work well with some of the best decks out there!" Mokuba announces with vigour, spreading his schematics across the table. He whispers as if this is some big secret, when the cyber-screen is watching them closely. "I have an audience with The Big 5 to look them over! If they approve... I'll get an apartment on your floor! Won't that be cool, Seto?"

The enthusiasm in his voice almost makes Seto hold back. Almost. "Mokuba, please..." he begs, eyes wide. "Please don't do this. Don't have an audience with The Big 5!"

"Why not?" he frowns, a sudden viciousness in his demeanour. "Don't you trust my work?"

"I trust your work, your work is brilliant! But... if you go to that meeting, I don't know if you'll come back,"

"You just said you trusted my work to be accepted, and yet you don't trust that I'm worth it?"

"I believe your work is worthy. Your work, they need. But you - why would they invest in someone new, when they can just use who they already have to build upon the work you've already done? Work they can use with you or without you. Please, if you go to this meeting... I can't bare losing you," 

Mokuba stands up suddenly in a display of pure rage. His olive skin fades to white in shock, enraged. The distraught child points down at Seto and answers with vitriolic menace. "Stop spouting your conspiracies in my house! Traitor, I could report you to the Thought Police!"

There's a calculating ferocity in Mokuba's eye. A clear desire to hit or kick Seto, and the consciousness of being within his right to do so. Seto cannot report him, he'd be killed. Mokuba has all the power here and he knows it. It's a good job Mokuba isn't in the Thought Police, Seto reflects.

"I'm going to see the tournament later," Mokuba sits back down, folding his hands over and talking normally, as if he hadn't just threatened his brother with execution. "Are you coming?"

Some Londonists were captured on the coast last week, apparently plotting to commit war crimes. And today, they are due to be sentenced to a Duel Monsters Tournament. A Duel Monsters Tournament forces prisoners to duel, with each loser being electrocuted to death by their duel disk. The victor, the final prisoner left alive, gets the privilege of being released onto the streets of Domino to beg and forage until they are inevitably murdered by a Gozaburo-fearing patriot simply for being the wrong ethnicity.

"I have work to do, I don't watch such things," Seto stands from the table.

"You should've been a duelist, big brother. You'd be amazing!" Seto sees the twinge of disappointment in Mokuba's eyes that he didn't pursue such a career. He had wanted to, as his little brother always talked about duelists and how awesome they are. But the prospect of murdering innocent people while being treated like a celebrity for doing so makes him weary.

"I'm really not the type to become a duelist," Seto smiles, a smile dripping with fake politeness. "I must be getting home, I have work to do," 

He lets himself out the door without a goodbye. He gets about halfway down the corridor when Mokuba's voice sounds after him.

"You're right!" he spins round in time to see Mokuba, still dressed in his best suit, grinning. "Duelists have cooler haircuts than you!"

*

Seto steps quickly past his cyber-screen and sits down at his little table. He thinks of Mokuba. In another year, maybe two, if he survives, he'll have surpassed Seto in both rank and favour. And he might start to suspect what happened to Gozaburo. Of course he suspects already, but if Mokuba tells anyone... 

Seto writes. 

_All children in KC are horrible. They have no outlet for their emotions; they aren't allowed one. They are allowed only to adore the party. So their ferocity is directed towards the outside. Spies, the unorthodox, thought criminals. For good reason - the newspapers constantly praise 'child heroes' (and in Kaiba Corp, a child is anyone under the age of 8) for denouncing their parents, friends, colleagues to the Thought Police._

_I remember when I was a child. I used to dream. Dreaming is dangerous, but I did it anyway. I dreamt of a world without darkness. And that world without darkness made me think of Mokuba. But now he is a part of the darkness, and I am surrounded by it. It closes in every moment._

His musing is interrupted by the cyber-screen.

 ** _"Attention! Attention!"_** Drones the voice. **_"Our forces in London have captured the leader of the enemy battalion! 100,000 war criminals have been killed, 250,000 prisoners taken! This is a great day for Post-Asiatic Domino!"_**

The broadcast ends with a slightly less enthusiastic:

**_"And next week, the food ration will be reduced by 100 grams,"_ **

The vodka is wearing off, leaving Seto feeling empty. A glory anthem plays on the cyber-screen. When it plays, you're supposed to stand to attention. However, at his desk Seto is invisible. So fuck the anthem.

Somewhere in the distance, a bomb crashes. They're enemy bombs, except Seto knows they aren't. He remembers what Gozaburo did to ensure the panic of war and the nationalism of Domino.

The voice of Gozaburo is everywhere. Outdoors, indoors, on cigarette packets and posters. It's not the moustachioed face that haunts him, it's the voice. He can't escape it. Because Gozaburo Kaiba is everywhere. Nothing is your own except the mass inside your skull.

Seto wonders again for whom he writes. For the future, for the past - for an age that might be imaginary. What lies ahead of him is not only death but annihilation. His notebook will inevitably be destroyed. Only the Thought Police will read what he has written before they wipe it from existence and from memory. How can he appeal to the future when no trace of him, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, will survive?

The cyber-screen strikes fourteen. He must leave in a few minutes. He must be back in his office by fourteen-thirty.

He dips his quill in the ink once again.

_To the future, to the past, to a time when thought is free._   
_From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of thought crime - greetings!_

He's already dead, he reflects.

_Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. DEATH IS THOUGHTCRIME._

Now that he knows he is dead, it becomes imperative to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his hand are inkstained - exactly the kind of detail that may betray him. Some robot (literally or figuratively) might start wondering why he was writing during lunch interval, why he was writing at all - _what_ he was writing - and then snitch to the nearest authority. 

He scrubs the ink away in his bathroom, careful to keep his hand concealed so the cyber-screen doesn't see. The gritty soap rasps his skin like sandpaper, good for this purpose.

Seto puts the notebook away in its drawer. Hiding it is useless, but he can at least know whether or not its existence is discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends would be too obvious. Instead, he places a tiny spec of dust on the edge of the cover. If the book is opened, even if the drawer is opened, it'll move. He also places a hair between the drawer handle and its cabinet. That way, he'll know if the drawer is opened too.

That's it, he decides. _I am Seto Kaiba and I have nothing to lose._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter wasn't my best. It was clunky to write, it's short... I don't know, it fucking sucks.

_Dreams are useless in their inaction. Acting on dreams is useless without their status as fantasy._

_~~~_

Seto dreams of his parents.

He was ten when they disappeared. His mother was a tall, statuesque woman who barely spoke and had straight brown hair. His father he remembers with striking, messy black hair, always dressed in dark, neat clothes and wearing spectacles. One day they were there and the next - gone. They both must have been swallowed up by one of the Great Purges under Gozaburo's command.

Seto remembers Mokuba as a sensitive child with large, watchful eyes gazing up at him for guidance. In his parents' faces was the knowledge that they must die so that their children remained alive. There was no reproach in their faces either, they didn't resent ether Seto or Mokuba for this eventuality.

Seto can't remember what happened to them, but he knows they sacrificed themselves for their children.

He dreams of utopia, too. Of green rolling pastures and abundance of everything. Of emotion, of complex sorrows. Of love and disunity and friendship and freedom. In his waking mind, he calls it _Duelist Kingdom_ , as ironic a name that is. Someone comes towards him across the field, a naked someone. Yami, with his hair flowing down having just been swimming in a nearby stream. His naked body doesn't arouse Seto - his expression does.

One of passion, of regret, of sorrow. Seto is overwhelmed by admiration for his confidence, an expression that annihilates authoritarianism with its depth of emotion. Yami is free and with one look, Gozaburo, Kaiba Corp, everything can be wiped away.

Seto wakes to the word 'freedom' on his lips.

The cyber-screen lets forth an ear-splitting whistle. It's seven-fifteen, the time when everyone at Kaiba Corp, be it mothers, newborns or the elderly, must wake up. Seto gets out of bed, naked. He can't afford pyjamas, as people on this floor receive only 3,000 clothing coupons per year, and pyjamas are 600. He tugs on a pair of thin boxers and erupts into a violent coughing fit, one that attacks him every morning. He needs an inhaler for during the night, but for now he can only gasp for breath. Inhalers are 400 medicine coupons, he has 120 saved up and his next allowance of 100 doesn't renew until next month

He might be dead by then.

His cyber-screen stops whistling, and a woman appears onscreen.

**_"Morning workout, initiate!"_ **

Seto springs to attention, knowing they watch morning workout very closely. He must wear a look of determined enjoyment, of engaged drivenness. As she guides them sharply through the workout, he vomits up air. If he had anything in his stomach, he'd vomit that up too.

Seto doesn't remember much from before Kaiba Corp, or before the orphanage. He remembers almost nothing of the orphanage itself, either. Yet he does remember his parents, and for some reason, an underground subway station. People sat on the ledge tightly packed and trains roared past. He and his family waited for the next train. An old couple stood beside them, the old man crying into his wife's shoulder. He reeked of vodka. Maybe whiskey. The old man, thought drunk, had clearly suffered under unbearable grief. The old man repeated the same sentence, over and over again, and Seto still remembers it vividly from his early childhood.

_"We should never have trusted them,"_

Who they shouldn't have trusted, he'll never know. He'd like to, but to trace history is impossible without a written record and there are none. And nobody talks about the past, it simply doesn't exist. For example, right now Domino is at war with London, and in alliance with the Republic. Nobody else but him seems to remember only four years ago when Domino was at war with the Republic.

But no. _"We have always been at war with London,"_

Officially, the previous war and change of partners never happened. Domino is at war with London, therefore Domino has always been at war with London. The enemy of the moment has always been absolute evil and any other stance, past or future, is impossible.

The most frightening thing is that this claim may be true. What is true is what Kaiba Corp decides is true because Kaiba Corp is Domino and that is much more terrifying than torture or death.

Seto breaks it down into premises, forming a logical argument.

P1) KC says that Domino has always been at war with London.

P2) Seto Kaiba knows that Domino was in alliance with London a short time ago.

P3) Seto Kaiba is the only one who knows this, and will soon be dead.

P4) What KC says is accepted as truth among all who do not know any different.

Conclusion: When he, Seto Kaiba, dies, nobody will know any different. Therefore, the lie becomes truth and Domino was always at war with London.

Yet he also knows the past, by its very nature, cannot be altered. What happened remains the truth and what didn't happen remains a lie no matter how many believe it. But that can be overcome, as Kaiba Corp claims, with doublethink. Or reality control, overcoming your own memories. Changing your past. Not only that, but actually destroying it.

Thankfully, the morning workout is over.

Seto tries to remember when life became so uniform, and he comes to any conclusion other than when he joined Kaiba Corp and became Gozaburo's adopted son. However, in the history, Gozaburo had been the leader of all things, in Domino, since the earliest days, before he was born. Yet he'd never heard the name until he entered the orphanage.

Seto fails to remember when he first heard of Kaiba Corp. Before the orphanage, surely. He remembers the words 'Kaiba Corp' from his earliest days, but it's possible they were simply a company then, before becoming the omnipotent state.

However terrible his memory is, Seto can pinpoint definite lies. It isn't true, for example, that Kaiba Corp invented Duel Monsters as they claim. He remembers hearing the name 'Maximillian Pegasus' in relation their invention. Yet he may have simply ben the leader of Kaiba Corp at the time, or Seto could be wrong. He has no evidence and can therefore prove nothing. Just his memory, as if that can prove falsification of a historical fact.

**_"Number 67-SK!"_ **

That's Seto.

**_"Get ready for work! You've been lost in thought! You've lost time, and have been idle for 140 seconds!"_ **

The woman (who is clearly an AI robot) on the cyber-screen screams at him in her commanding voice. It wrenches him from his thoughts, and he resumes his morning tasks; running his hair under cold water, eating his meagre breakfast and dressing in a dark green suit with a royal purple coat. He does all this with an inscrutable expression. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eye could give him away. The woman continues to watch him scurry around, finding everything he needs and pushing it into his metal briefcase.

**_"That's it, my colleague! That's much better!"_ **

She adds with encouragement as Seto, with a final shove to cram everything into his briefcase, succeeds in leaving for work sober for the first time in years.


	4. Chapter 4

_Objective truths cannot be framed by subjective narrative: it is impossible to avoid becoming fraudulent._

~~~

With a deep sigh not even the nearest cyber-screen can prevent Seto from uttering, he begins work. He presses a button and a holographic field alights around him. Words appear on the holographic field in bright white, Times New Roman font. He flicks through the Update Pages with his finger, locating his number under S, which doesn't make sense to be alphabetised by first name, when numbers come first, but whatever. 

Seto Kaiba is a journalist. He's heard stories of how journalists worked last millennia, with cameras and newspapers, going around collecting stories. Journalism now is quite a different job. He is given a holographic field of short snippets of information and he reads it out on camera, which is then broadcast around everyone's cyber-screens outside of Kaiba Corp for the morning news bulletin.

Each page on his section, and he and the authorities are the only ones able to view his section, contain a message of only one or two lines, not in Newspeak but traditional 'Japanese Literary Speak'. 

_Food production has increased by 100 grains per yield this month._

It hasn't - their rations have decreased. Seto remembers the cyber-screen telling him that. Apparently, those outside of Kaiba Corp aren't privy to such sensitive information as their own rations. 

_1,000,000 war criminals have been caught._

Wasn't it 100,000? 

Seto sits at his desk by the holographic field and begins to speak. If he deviates from the holo-prompter for more than a few words, the blinking cyber-screen opposite him will end the broadcast and he will be arrested. 

Day by day, he brings the past up to date. No item of news or expression of opinion is allowed to conflict the needs of the moment for Kaiba Corp. If it is necessary to tell the people of Post-Asiatic Domino that the food rations have increased instead of decreased, that is what is reported. He wonders if the people out there believe him. They must, or Kaiba Corp would be in ruins. 

"For the last quarter of 2983," he reads aloud to the nation, "Sixty-two million pairs of boots were produced, over-fulfilling the quota of fifty-seven million," 

This is not even forgery. It is simply spewing nonsense. Nothing he says has any connection to the real world, not even that of an outright lie. Statistics are expected to be improvised. Sixty-two million pairs is no nearer to the truth than fifty-seven million pair, or one-hundred million pairs. Very likely, nobody knows how many were produced, much less cares. All anyone knows is that every quarter, astronomical numbers of boots are produced in Seto's reports while he hasn't seen anyone in a pair made after 2975. 

So it is with every recorded fact, great or small. Everything fades away into a shadow-realm in which, finally, even the current year is uncertain. 

Part of Seto's job is to erase his old recordings, too. Yet he is never allowed to listen to them, nor can he. The files are blocked - he has the power simply to erase the ones marked red and he never knows which these are. He deletes reports in which he mentioned the names of people who are never to have existed, or events that are never to have happened. Four years ago he was reporting on the war agaisnt the Republic, and all of those reports are never to have happened. 

Seto has never met another journalist, but he presumes more must exist. He wonders if they remember the broadcasts they gave on that war. If they think the same as he does. He wonders if they showed the same faked video recordings that he now shows, but faked again to look like a different war. Seto has a talent for identifying photos and videos that have been faked and re-faked, painted over and over. He now shows the same videos he showed four years ago, but this time the soldiers have different faces, different ethnicities. Do the other journalists see these too? 

His greatest pleasure in his life is his work. It gives him access to the most intricate system of rewrites and creative expounding of the truth to ever exist. He can lose himself in his reports as in the depths of a mathematical problem. In every report he makes, finding X is finding his contradicting memories of previous reports. He is entrusted by Kaiba Corp to relay their exact messages in his estimation of what they want him to say. 

"And the war against London, which we have been fighting since 1650, continues to rage on as we launch a direct assault against its neighbouring country: Highland," 

Seto realises that he can say anything on this broadcast, and the whole country will hear him. He could say 'I've been lying to you all this time, none of this is true' and while most wouldn't listen to him, it'd be enough to plant the seeds of doubt in some people's minds. While he might die quicker than expected, he could still say whatever he wanted. 

And yet, he continues to read, verbatim, what the holographic field projects. 

It's rare for Kaiba Corp to make a public spectacle out of political criminals, but in Seto's hypothetical, they'd be forced to publicly denounce him as a Thought Criminal. Such public spectacles only surface every couple of years, the purge of several Thought Criminals at once. More commonly, people who displease Kaiba Corp simply disappear and are never heard of again. One never knows what happens to them. In some cases, they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Seto, not counting his parents, have disappeared at one time or another. 

When people are arrested, one cannot invariably assume they are dead. Sometimes they are released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year before being executed. Very occasionally someone he believed to be long-dead will make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial were he will implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time forever. 

Seto deletes an old broadcast, one from November of last year. He is instructed to make another in its place. What should he say? It's best to invent a piece of pure fantasy to void being too obvious or complicating the records too much. So he makes something up, something about Noah Kaiba commending the most recent development in cyborg technology by integrating electrical wires with the human nervous system. There was no such development, but a few lines of text and fake holograms would birth it into existence. 

Seto thinks for a moment before leaning into the microphone and begins dictating in his familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ("What lesson do we learn from this fact? The lesson - which is also one of the most fundamental principles of Kaiba Corp, is-" etc), easy to replicate this same mannerisms months later. 

This discovery, unimagined an hour ago, is now a fact. It strikes him as curious that he can create the past but not the present. A new discovery never existed in the present, but now does in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, it will exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Einstein or Newton. 


	5. Chaptyer 5

_And if you swallow whatever you are given, it isn't murder when you are given poison. To not resist the propaganda is to give consent of believing it._   
_~~~_

In the high-ceilinged canteen, on the hundredth floor of KC Headquarters, the lunch queue crawls forward slowly. The room is very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter, the steam of _something_ comes pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell that doesn't quite overcome the fumes of unbranded _VODKA_. On the opposite side of the room is a small bar, merely a hole in the wall, where vodka can be bought by the shot.

"Hey, big bro - colleague,"

Seto turns around. It's Mokuba, who he seldom sits with at lunch because he's seldom here. His prominent eyes, mournful and derisive, search Seto's face closely while speaking to him.

"I have my presentation with the Big 5 this afternoon,"

"Well, that should be-" Seto stops talking with a guilty haste.

"...wonderful," he adds untruthfully.

The queue jerks forward. Seto turns to face Mokuba again and each take a metal tray from the pile by the counter.

"Did you go and see the tournament yesterday?"

"I was working," Seto answers indifferently. "I'll stream it, I suppose,"

"A very inadequate substitute,"

His eyes rove over Seto's face. _I know you,_ his eyes seem to say. _I know very well why you didn't go to the tournament yesterday._ In an intellectual way, Mokuba is vehemently orthodox. He talks with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of duellist tournaments, the trials and confessions of Though Criminals, the executions in the underground of this building. Talking to him is largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of duelling strategies, on which he's authoritative and interesting. Seto turns his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large, dark eyes.

"It was a good tournament," he says reminiscently. "I think it spoils it when they up the wattage for efficient deaths. I like to see them seize. And above all, the final gasping for breath. That's the detail that appeals to me,"

 _"Next, please,"_ instructs the automatic voice on the dispenser.

The food is regulation for all Kaiba Corp workers. It is a manufactured, synthetic protein paste called 'Unflavoured Psuedo-Whey', which hold the nutrients for one meal without holding any taste, or real texture other than slime. Apparently, Kaiba Corp sells a similar product outwith the building but Seto can't imagine why anyone would consume it voluntarily.

"There's a table over there," Mokuba jerks his head towards one. "Let's get vodka on the way," 

They place their trays on the metal table, clanging their metal shot glasses on the edge. Seto picks up his glass, pauses for an instant to collect his nerve and gulps the fire down. When he winks the tears from his eyes he discovers he's so hungry. He begins swallowing spoonfuls of the unnamed whey. Neither of them speak again until their trays are emptied, simply listening to the general uproar of the room.

"Are you prepared for your presentation?" asks Seto, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

"As prepared as I can be," answers Mokuba. "I have my strategies done, I just need to pull them together. Public speaking is difficult,"

He brightened up immediately at the mention of strategies. He leans across the table so as to speak without shouting.

"What I've created is a definitive solution to the worry that Yami Mutou - the best duelist ever - could ever lose, that tiniest chance. And with this, nobody could assume anything else. He'll never lose, always win as will his successor. And I've written them all in Newspeak!"

Seto chokes down a groan. Newspeak is Mokuba's dreaded hobby. Everyone else has obediently learned and uses the language upon the order of KC, but Mokuba has made it his passion for reasons unknown.

"Newspeak is so fascinating..."

_No, it isn't!_

"It doesn't invent new words, as the name suggests. No - it destroys them! Hundreds, every day until the language is cut down to the bone. No words we are using right now will be known after the year 3050!"

Mokuba eats hungrily, then continues speaking, with a certain pedant's passion. His dark face has become animated, his eyes have lost their mocking expression and have grown almost dreamy.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. The great wastage is in verbs and adjectives, but hundreds of nouns are useless as well. It isn't only the synonyms, but also the antonyms. After all, why should a word exist if it is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains the opposite of itself. Take the word 'good' for example, what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' is so much better - because it's the exact opposite, which 'bad' is not. Orv if you want a stronger version of 'good' why have lots of useless words like 'excellent' or 'splendid' and the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. We use these as Newspeak right now, but soon there will be nothing else. Soon the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by... well only one word, really. Don't you see the beauty of that, Seto?"

Mokuba detects a lack of enthusiasm.

"You don't appreciate Newspeak, Seto," he sighs, sadly. "Or duelling. When you talk about them, you're still thinking like you did before you came here. I've watched your broadcasts. They're good, but they're a chore to you. You'd prefer to be doing anything else, and doing it in Oldspeak. You don't grasp the beauty of Newspeak. Don't you know that Newspeak is the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller and smaller every year?"

Of course, Seto knows that. He smiles sympathetically, not trusting himself to speak.

"Don't you see that the whole point of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"

_That's why I hate it._

"In the end, we'll make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there won't be any words to express it. Ever concept that can be needed will be expressed by exactly _one_ word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings erased and forgotten. We aren't far from that point already. But the process will continue long after you and I are dead. Every year, vocabulary and therefore the range of consciousness will become smaller. Of course, there's no reason or excuse to commit thoughtcrime now, but soon the language will be perfect," he adds with a sort of mystical satisfaction.

_You commit thoughtcrime every second of every day. Mokuba. Don't forget that._

"By the year 3050, at the very latest, not a single person alive will understand such a conversation as we are having now,"

"Except-" begins Seto doubtfully, and then he stops. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the people outside Kaiba Corp', those who live beyond the walls of this building, in the actual city. But he checks himself, not feeling certain the remark isn't in some way unorthodox. Mokuba, however, divines exactly what he was about to say.

"Those who live outside of Kaiba Cop are not human beings," he adds carelessly.

"By 3050 - earlier, probably - all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed - Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, Moffat, Rowling - they'll exist only in Newspeak. Changed to be contradictory to what they used to be. Even the literature of Kaiba Corp will change. The slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like 'DOUBT ALL DOUBTS' when the concept of doubt has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness,"

 _After this presentation,_ Seto thinks with sudden deep conviction, _Mokuba will disappear. He's too intelligent, he sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. Kaiba Corp does not like such people. Today, he'll disappear. It's written in his face._

Mokuba falls silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon, he traces patterns in his 'food' otherwise not touching it.

 _Unquestioningly, Mokuba will be taken,_ Seto thinks again. He thinks with a deep sadness, although knowing that Mokuba is fully capable of denouncing Seto for what he really is. _What I did to Gozavburo Kaiba._

There is something subtly wrong with Mokuba. There is something he lacks - discretion, aloofness. He remembers something he read about the 21st and 22nd centuries, that their psychology detected a neurological disorder called 'Aspergers Syndrome'. A thousand tears ago, Mokuba would be diagnosed with that. But such a thing has been eliminated along with autonomy.

You couldn't say Mokuba is unorthodox. He believes in the principles of Kaiba Corp, he venerates the Big 5 and Noah Kaiba, he rejoices over victories and hates heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of the information which the ordinary member of Kaiba Corp dare not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability clings to him. He says things that would be better unsaid, he's read too many books, he frequents the dingy low floors of the headquarters haunted by 'free thinkers'. There is no law against this, even an unwritten one, against doing this, yet it's somehow ill-omened.

Mokuba's fate is not difficult to forsee. And yet if Mokuba grasped the true nature of Seto Kaiba. he'd betray him to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter: but Mokuba more than most. Zeal is not enough. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Mokuba looks up. "Here comes Wheeler,"

 _That idiot,_ Seto thinks to himself.

Joey Wheeler lives on the 170th floor, as a proletariat member of Kaiba Corp, an entertainer. He's a tall-ish, raggedy man with blonde hair. At sixteen he has already been in several dozen different low-level job positions. His whole appearance is that of a child grown tall, so much so that if he was to change into the children's' uniform of the Youth League, he would look less out of place.

He greets Seto and Mokuba with a cheery "Hey, yo!" and sits down at the table. Mokuba pulls out his prepared speech, written on flashcards, and begins to study it. Avoiding the awkwardness of Seto and Joey is a desperate goal for him.

Seto and Joey had a 'thing' that Mokuba remembers with disgust, as an asexual and member of the Anti-Sexuality ideology. And ever sicne they broke up some months ago, their interactions have grown weary.

"Hey, don't work away your lunch hour! This time is for food and food alone!" he turns to Seto. "Hey, there's a reason I'm chasin' you down. You forgot to give me the donation for the next tournament,"

Of course, he's organising that. He's a passionate volunteer for duel tournaments, loves Duel Monsters more than anything. But he's talentless at the game and subsequently gets involved at the sidelines on the organising committees.

Seto pulls out his phone and transfers his donation to Joey, who sends him a digital receipt back, the transaction taking less than ten seconds.

"By the way, I've heard you haven't been to any duels," Joey frowns, his face asking the obvious 'why not'? But thankfully Joey's attention span doesn't focus on the thought for very not. "Not like your brother - eh? Mokuba has the right spirit, all you think about are the duels, isn't it?"

"Hm," Mokuba nods. "That's right, I forgot to tell you, Seto!"

He turns to face his older brother, who blinks back in surprise.

"On Saturday, I was a few floors up overseeing the logistics for Battle City, just making sure the duel arena was alright... I spotted a strange man and handed him over to the patrols,"

"What did you do that for?" Seto asks, somewhat taken aback. He wonders if he fits Mokuba's definition of 'strange man'.

"I spotted that he was wearing a strange kind of shoe - a kind I haven't before seen, and worked out he'd been dealing on the free market. Wasn't I sharp for catching that, Seto?"

He looks at him, pleading for approval of affirmation. Seto stares into the empty vodka cup.

"What happened to the man?"

"Of course I can't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if-" Mokuba makes the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

"Good," Joey shrugs.

"Of course, we can't afford to take chances," Seto agrees dutifully.

"We must remember there is a war on,"

As if to confirm this assertion, a trumpet sounds and the cafeteria is overrun by military droids playing a recording message with the voice of one of the Big Five, Seto can't tell which one. Not an important message, it's merely an administrations announcement.

"Attention! We have glorious news for you! We have won the battle for production! The standard of living has raised by 20%! All over Domino this morning there were spontaneous demonstrations by the workers when they paraded onto the streets of voicing their praises of Kaiba Corp for the long, happy lives our wisdom has bestowed upon them. Here are some of the completed figures-"

The phrase 'long, happy lives' recurs several times. It has been a favourite of late with Kaiba Corp announcements. Joey, his attention caught by the call, listens with edified boredom. He can't follow the statistics, but he knows they mean something good. Seto shuts out all outside noises and focuses on the announcement, which states that Food rations have risen to 100 grams. Except Seto remembers broadcasting that it deceased only yesterday. He wonders if they can swallow this contradictory propaganda after only 24 hours. Yes, they swallow it. Joey swallows it easily. Mokuba too - in some complex way, involving doublethink - swallows it. Is Seto, then, _alone_ in the presence of memory? 

The fabulous statistics continue to pour out of the holographic screens. As compared with last year there is more food, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more AI, more duel disks, more books, more babies - more of everything except crime, disease and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, the number of everything whizzes rapidly upwards. Seto meditates resentfully on the texture of life. Was it always like this? Did food always taste like this? He looks around the canteen. Its walls are grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs placed so tightly together that you sit with your elbows bumping, bent spoons, dented trays; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack. Always in his skin, there is the feeling of protest, a feeling that he was cheated out of something he should have a right to.

True, he has no memories of anything greatly different. In the orphanage beyond the walls of Kaiba Corp, there wasn't enough to eat, clothes were full of holes, furniture was battered and rickety, rooms unheated, trains crowded houses falling to pieces - nothing cheap and plentiful except foreign vodka and cigarettes. But it's been so much worse since he was adopted into KaibaCorp. Is this not a sign then that this is _not_ the natural order of things? Why would he find it so intolerable unless things were once different?

Seto looks around the canteen again. Isn't it strange that the ideal set up by the Big Five - of tall, muscular men with bright eyes and energetic smiles - is scarce when he looks around? Most people here are small and malnourished, even his cyborg son Noah Kaiba with his transhuman implants. Everyone looks like Joey.

The announcement ends with another trumpet call.

"They've certainly done a good job this year," he says with a knowing shake of his head.

Seto finds himself thinking of Mokuba again. His presentation is this afternoon, and this afternoon he will disappear. Mokuba will disappear. Seto will disappear. Joey, on the other hand, will never disappear. And the best duelist - Yami Mutou - will never disappear. Seto thinks that he knows everyone who will survive and everyone who will perish. 

At this moment, he is dragged out his reverie. The very man he was thinking of enters the canteen to a cacophony of singing praises and applause. Yami Mutou looks over at Seto in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant he catches Seto's eye, he looks away again.

A horrible pang of terror goes through Seto. It leaves almost at once but leaves behind a nagging uneasiness. Why was the best duelist in Kaiba Corp - in the world - watching him?

He doesn't know how long Yami was looking at him, it may have been a few minutes and it's possible Seto's features weren't perfectly under control. Letting your thoughts wander is terribly dangerous in public or within range of a cyberscreen. The smallest thing can give you away. A nervous tick, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carries with it the suggestion of abnormality. To wear an improper expression on your face (an incredulous look when a duel is won, for example) is itself a punishable offence. There is even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it's called.

"Did I ever tell you?" Mokuba grins at Joey. "About the time Seto and I set fire to a woman's skirt because I saw her hiding some food bought clearly on the free market/ We sneaked up behind her and I set the back of her skirt on fire. We burned her quite badly, didn't we Seto?"

He looks away, feeling nauseous at the memory of charred, burning flesh.

"That's when Gozaburo knew he'd made the right decision to adopt us,"

The cyberscreen lets out a piercing whistle. It's the signal to return to work. All three, Seto, Joey, and Mokuba, spring to their feet. Mokuba grabs his equipment for the pitch and moves to the higher floors and Seto realises, with a stark shock, that this is the last time he'll see his only remaining family member alive.


	6. Chapter 6

_The murder of one creates freedom for all, only if that one was the real oppressor._

~~~

Seto writes.

_It was two years ago. It was on a shining afternoon in the highest floor of Kaiba Corp. He was standing imperially against the window, his finger outstretched and pointing at me. His voice thundered at me, threatened me. His eyes drilled through mine, through my skull with ease, the creaking of my skull piercing through my ears and making them scream. Made me scream, and run. My hands made contact with his chest, and I-_

For a moment it's too difficult to go on. He closes his eyes and presses his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that keeps recurring. He has an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot out of Kaiba Corp through the window. To do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black our the vision that torments him.

 _Your worst enemy,_ he reflects, _is your own nervous system._ At any moment, the tension inside you is liable to transfer itself into some visible symptom. He thinks of a man he passed in the corridor a few weeks back: a quite ordinary man he didn't recognise, tall and thin and carrying a briefcase. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face contorted in some sort of spasm. It happened again as they passed one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the click of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. Seto remembers thinking at the time: _that poor man is done for._

What was frightening was that the action was possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all is talking in your sleep. There's no way of guarding against that, as far as he can see.

He draws in his breath and continues writing.

_I pushed him in the chest and watched as, slowed before my eyes, he toppled back into the glass. Through the shattered window, I watched him falling through the air, passing by many floors. He-_

Simultaneously with Gozaburo Kaiba, he thinks of Noah. He met Noah when he first arrived at Kaiba Corp, but then Gozaburo's son was in a vat of some tick preserving liquid-gel covered in wires. Like formalin for living cells. His consciousness was uploaded to a digital filing system, and a hologram of him appeared - a holoform. As far as Seto knows, he still is a holoform, as he's never touched Noah. Seto remembers staring into those eyes not quite there.

When he killed Gozaburo, it was the first time in his life he felt free. He couldn't believe he'd nerved himself to break any rule, let alone murdering the beloved leader. It was a life-and-death matter, and for months afterwards he laid in bed waiting to disappear. But he didn't. Instead, he went down to Joey's floor.

The proletariat members of KC aren't meant to mix with those of the upper floors - they can be friends but certainly not date. But to an extent, debauchery like that is implicitly encouraged by KC, as an outlet for instincts which cannot altogether be suppressed. Mere debauchery doesn't matter much so long as it only involves people like Joey, members of the submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime is promiscuity between members of the upper floors who hold real positions. But that is a difficult thing to imagine actually happening.

KC doesn't only aim to prevent people forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose is to remove all pleasure from the romantic or sexual act. Love and eroticism is the enemy, inside marriage a well as outside of it. All marriages between people in KC must be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and - though the principle is never clearly stated - permission is always refused if the couple concerned give the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognised purpose of marriage is to create children for the service of KC, or to adopt orphans from orphanages and turn them into productive members of society, as is the case with couples who cannot produce biological children. Sexual intercourse should be seen as a slightly disgusting, minor inconvenience.

This is never put into plain words, but in an indirect way is imprinted on ever member of KC from childhood. There are even the Anti-Sexuality leagues for children which advocate for complete celibacy for all. All children should be had by artificial insemination and raised in public institutions never knowing their parents. Perhaps because he spent his childhood in an orphanage outside of KC, Seto never had this view of sex.

Seto thinks again of Joey. It must be nine, nearly ten months since they parted. It's curious how seldom he now thinks of Joey. For days at a time he is capable of forgetting they were ever together. They were only together for about fifteen months.

Very early in his relationship with Joey, Seto decided that he had perhaps the stupidest, most vulgar and empty mind of anyone he had ever met. He had not a thought in his head that was not a slogan and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that he wouldn't swallow if KC told him to. Yet he could have endured staying with Joey if it hadn't been for one thing - sex.

As soon as Seto touched Joey, he seemed to wince and stiffen. When he pulled Joey close, he had the feeling that he was pulling away with all his strength. He remembers Joey telling him about his father, an incredibly abusive man who was eventually executed for his crimes against his children - getting violently drunk and beating them, and when the mood struck him, another kind of debauchery that made Joey see sex as inherently grotesque.

When Joey and Seto had sex, Joey would lie there with his eyes closed, neither resisting nor cooperating, but _submitting_. It as extraordinarily embarrassing and, after a while, horrible. But even then, Seto could have endured being with him if it was agreed they should remain celibate. But strangely enough it was Joey who refused this. So the performance occurred once a week regularly, whenever it was not impossible. Joey even used to remind Seto that morning, as if sex were something that had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. Quite soon, Seto grew to have the feeling of dread when the appointed day came.

It turns out, Joey was trying to get rid of his fear of sex, using Seto to do that. In the end, they agreed to stop trying, and soon afterwards they parted.

Seto sighs inaudibly. He picks up his pen again and writes.

_He crashed to the ground and in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, his body broke in two. His blood exploded across the ground. I -_

Seto sees himself running, running from Gozaburo's floor down, down, down, down the staircases and by chance not meeting a robot, or running into a cyberscreen. He ran into his flat, which was floors below where it is now, and curled up in his bed to cry silently Why does it have to be like this? Why couldn't he have stayed beyond these walls, had real parents instead of being adopted by Gozaburo Kaiba?

What Seto wants, more than even to be loved, is to break down the wall between him and another, even once in his life. The sexual act, successfully performed, is rebellion. Desire is thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Joey, if he could have achieved it, would have been like an assault, although they were an illegal couple to begin with.

But how Gozaburo died must be written down. He writes.

_I felt relief in my chest when the door knocked. I thought they were there to arrest me, but-_

There had been guards at the door to 'inform him' that their beloved Gozabro Kaiba was dead. Of course he feigned grief, but he expected, hoped, that it meant his tyranny was over and things would change.

_What a fool I was._

It must be written down. It mut be confessed. He writes hurriedly, in scrambled writing.

_I cried, even though I was so happy. I wanted him dead, I would do the same now, but even still, I cried._

He presses his fingers against his eyelids again. It is written at last, but it makes no difference. The therapy hasn't worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice is as strong as ever.


	7. Chapter 7

_A proletariat revolution will not simply get rid of tyranny, it will make tyranny an impossibility._

~~~

 _If there is hope,_ Seto writes, _it lies in the proletariat_. Because only they, specifically the ones outside of KC, can force the destruction of tyranny. KaibaCorp cannot be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it has any enemies, have no way of identifying one another and organising. Even if the legendary spies and enemies of KC exist, as they possibly might, is it impossible that they could assemble in numbers of more than twos or threes. Rebellion means a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proletariat, if they become conscious of their own strength, need only to rise up. If they chose to they could blow KaibaCorp to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later, it will occur to them to do it.

Seto remembers how when Gozaburo was killed, he heard thousands of voices, crying voices, burst from the streets for days. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair that went humming on like the reverberation of a bel. His heart had leapt.

 _It's started!_ he had thought. _A riot! The proletariat are breaking loose at last!_

He looked, hundreds of floors down to see several hundred people crowding around the KaibaCorp headquarters, with faces as tragic as if they had been doomed passengers on a sinking ship.

Seto watched in disgust as large robots, ten feet tall brandishing weapons similar to automated military guns from the 21st and 22nd century, appeared around the perimeter. They stood in silence, facing the proletariats. They shot one. A random person, nobody even near the front.

The rest just ran.

And yet, for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in the cry from only a few hundred throats! Why didn't they storm the building when it mattered?! When they had the chance?!

He writes.

_Until they become conscious they cannot rebel, and until they rebel they cannot become conscious._

That, he reflects, may as well be a transcription from one of KaibaCorp's manuals. KC claims, of course, that they liberated those who live beyond its walls from the bondage of government. Before KaibaCorp they had been hideously oppressed by capitalism, they had been starved, women were forced to work in underground nuclear plants (they still are, as a matter of fact) to generate energy, children were sold to research facilities at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, KC taught that the outsiders are natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

In reality, inside KC very little is known about the outsiders. It's not necessary to know much. So long as they continue to work and breed to fund KC and its luxuries, their other activities are of no importance. They die, for the most part, at sixty according to the propaganda Seto generates for his reports. But he's sure it must be earlier than that.

To keep the outsiders in control is not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police always moved among them, spreading false rumours and eliminating the few individuals who are judged capable of becoming dangerous. When they become discontented, as they sometimes do, their discontent leads nowhere. Being unable to access KaibaCorp, they can only focus on petty, specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escape their notice. They have cyberscreens in their homes and robots patrolling the areas, but that is all. There is no crime because there are no laws and as long as the ugliness occurs outside of KC, they pay no notice.

As KaibaCorp puts it _'Outsiders and Animals are Free'._

Seto grabs his growling stomach. It has began to bother him again. The thought he returns to is the impossibility of knowing what life was like before KaibaCorp. He pulls a KC textbook from the drawer under his diary, as is in every home, and copies a passage of it into the notebook.

_"In the old days, before the revolution of the machines, the world was a dark, dirty place full of disease, death, old age, broken bones, physical and mental illnesses - which we, the transhumanists, have made obsolete. People had to grow their own food in fields and reared animals to slaughter viciously before the glory of genetic engineering. The cruel masters of this society were called 'governments'. Governments were run by fat, ugly men with wicked faces. The uniform of the governments was a suit and tie if various, colours, with a white business shirt. The governments ran the world, and everyone else was their slave._

_If you disobeyed the governments, they would throw you in prison, take your job away and starve you to death. When any ordinary person addressed the government they had to bow and act formally, calling them 'sir' and 'President'. The chief of the government was called the United Nations, and- "_

But Seto knows the rest. It is enforced in the heads of everyone in KC, he only escaped the first few years of indoctrination beause he only arrived here at the age of twelve.

How can he know how much of it is lies? It may be true that the average human is better off now than they were before KaibaCorp. The only evidence to the contrary is the protest in his own head, the instinctive feeling that the conditions he lives in are intolerable and that at some other time it must have been different.

It strikes Seto that the only characteristic thing about modern life is the emptiness of it. Life bears no resemblance not only to the lies streaming from the cyberscreens and his broadcasts, but even to the ideals KC strives to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a member of KC, are neutral. The ideal set up by KaibaCorp is something huge, terrible and glittering - a world of cyborgs without humanity, or machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face made of steel.

The reality is decaying, dingy apartments where underfed people shuffle to and fro around a huge complex without stepping a foot outside in their entire lives. He grabs his stomach again. Day and night the cyberscreens bruise one's ears with statistics proving that people today have so much food, clothes, better houses - they do not age, they do not work, are bigger, stronger, healthier than people were in the past millennia all thanks to augmentations from machines. If Seto desired, right now, he could go to the medical centre and have his entire digestive system replaced by a system of internal devices. In fact, that's something KC also propagates because the fewer stomachs, the less food they need to provide. It's very likely a replacement digestive system will soon become mandatory, and nobody will know what eating ever felt like.

Not a word of KaibaCorp's claims can ever be proved or disproved. They claim, for example, that now 40% of those living outside its walls are cyborgs to an extent. Before KaibaCorp, that number was only 15%. It's like a single equation with two unknowns. It may very well be that literally every word in the statistics reports and history books are pure fantasy. For all he knows, there may have never been such thing as governments, or any such creature as a President, or any such garment as a suit and tie.

Everything fades into mist. The past is erased, the erasure forgotten, the lie becomes truth. Just once in his life has Seto possessed - after the event, that's what counted - unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 2978.

The adoption papers from the orphanage, Seto clutched them in is hands as Gozaburo stood above him. The story everyone in KaibaCorp knew, everyone in the country must now know, is that a proletariat child challenged Gozaburo to a chess game, giving him the ultimatum of 'If I win, you must adopt us'. Gozaburo accepted, and won of course. But out of the kindness of his heart, he adopted the children anyway. He was praised and venerated for this kindness until the day he died, and still is.

However, in his hands, Seto held a copy of the adoption papers, and they stated in black and white:

 **_ Reason for Adoption:  _ ** **_Anyone who can defeat me in a game of chess is the most worthy successor to the KaibaCorp empire._ **

The paper was plucked from his hand and sent up one of those tubes to be incinerated. New adoption papers appeared within the week, this time stating the complete opposite. But for a single moment, Seto Kaiba held irrefutable evidence of conspiracy.

Today, he would have done anything to keep that document. Even holding it in his finger makes a difference to him, even now when it's only a memory. Is KaibaCorp's hold on the past weaker, he wonders, because of a piece of evidence that no longer exists but that _had once existed_?

But today, supposing it could be resurrected from its ashes, would the document even be evidence? Very likely, the story of Gozaburo Kaiba has been re-written and re-written until the original facts or dates make no sense. The past not only changes, but changes continuously. What most afflicts Seto with the sense of nightmare is that he has never understood _why_ the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past are obvious, but the ultimate motive is mysterious. He takes his pen again and writes:

_I understand the HOW: I do not understand the WHY._

Seto wonders, as he has many times, if he is a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic is simply a minority of one. At one time it was a sin of madness to believed the Earth revolves around the sun: today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic doesn't trouble Seto: the horror is that he might also be wrong.

He picks up the history book and looks at the picture of Gozaburo on the front. The hypnotic eyes gaze into his own. It's as though some huge force is pressing down upon him - it penetrates inside his skull, battering against his brain, frightening him out of his beliefs, persuading him, almost to deny the evidence of his senses.

In the end, KaibaCorp will announce that two and two make five, and he will have to believe It's inevitable that they'll make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demands it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of reality is tacitly denied by their philosophy. And what is terrifying is not that they will kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and reality exist only in the mind - and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

_No!_

The face of Noah Kaiba appears in his mind. He knows, with more certainty than before, that Noah Kaiba is on his side. He is writing the diary for Noah - _to_ Noah. It's like an interminable letter which nobody will ever read, but which is addressed to a particular person and takes its colour from that fact.

KaibaCorp tells you to reject the evidence of your sense. That is their final, most essential command. His heart sinks as he thinks of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any KC intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments he would not be able to understand, much less answer.

And yet he's right. They are wrong and he is right. The obvious, the silly and the true must be defended. Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists, its freedoms do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects fall towards the Earth's centre. With the feeling that he is speaking to Noah Kaiba, and also that he is setting forth an important axiom, he writes:

_Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows._


	8. Chapter 8

_The true horror of death is not the state itself, but the anticipation of terror._

~~~

From somewhere at the bottom of the passage, the smell of vodka - real vodka, not _VODKA_ \- comes floating down the corridor. He pauses involuntarily. A door bangs, something to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

This is the second evening in three weeks that Seto has missed a duel tournament. A rash act, since it's certain that the number of your attendances is carefully checked. In principle, a member of KC as no spare time, and is never alone except in bed. It's assumed that when you aren't eating or sleeping that you are taking part in some community or state-wide volunteer work. To do anything that suggests a taste for solitude, even going on a walk by yourself, is slightly dangerous. There's a word for it in Newspeak: _ownlife_. Meaning individualism and eccentricity.

But this evening, Seto is tempted by the sense of seclusion. He looks out the window, the sky a warmer blue than he remembers. Suddenly a long, noisy duel tournament, the boring, exhausting games seems intolerable. On impulse, he walks the opposite way form the arena to explore KaibaCorp HQ himself. He walks until he loses himself among unknown streets and hardly bothers in which direction he's going.

He walks down, down until he's somewhere in the bowels of the building, the first two-hundred-or-so floors. Where Joey lives, where the proletariat lives. Filthy stains line the walls, battered doorways into tiny apartments Seto would be too long to lie down in. The free market is rife, every second doorway someone whispers out their prices. People swarm in astonishing numbers - girls in makeup, which technically you aren't supposed to wear in KC, children dressed in rags who pee on the walls, cresting more stains - Seto looks in open doors to find many apartment windows not windows at all and mere open holes, or cardboard.

If Seto passes robots, or even guards, he will be stopped and questioned on his unusual attire for this area. 'What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home? What are you doing here?'. Not that there are any rules against him being here, but it's enough to draw attention to him if the Thought Police hear about it.

Suddenly, the street erupts in commotion. People shoot into their doorways, grab their children and huddle against the walls. At the same instant, Joey emerges from a side door, runs towards Seto and grabs him by arm.

"What are you doing here?! Nevermind, there's a purge!" He drags Seto into an apartment, not the one Joey had before - is this even his floor? - and they huddle just inside the closed, locked doorway. Seto looks out through the keyhole.

Joey was right, a purge is on. The proletariats are always right when they give you such a warning. He watches as the guards - largely cyborgs engineered for war, but stationed here as droids to keep order - sweep down the hallway and pick up anyone unfortunate enough to still be outside. Opposite the door Seto hides in with Joey, a drunk man is passed out against the frame. Suddenly, his body is crushed under the weight of one of the cyborg's metal legs. He howl a frighteningly loud howl that must reach three, four floors. The cyborg places a gun against his temple, and his eyes face forward, frozen that way.

Seto feels like those eyes are staring into his own, even if it's impossible the man sees him through the keyhole. Then his head jerks to the side, with the deafening roar of the gunshot.

The robots pass, and he looks over at Joey. Joey is curled up in a ball, knees drawn to his chest. Tears stream down his face. Without a word, Seto stands up, leaves the apartment and walks along the hall.

On the white sheet of plaster, like the walls of a hospital, are bright red streaks. His path is blocked by a bloody hand severed off at the wrist. Bodies line the walls, charred with black smoke, perhaps some were burned with a blowtorch. The great purges, a way to keep the adult proletariat population low. If Seto didn't come down here, he'd have never even known. Possibly nobody on the upper floors knows of these purges.

He pauses for a moment at the top of the steps. One of the apartment doors is now open and inside, Seto views an elderly man eighty at least, taking deep wheezing exhales on a strangely shaped glass pipe. It occurs to Seto that this man must have been middle aged when KaibaCorp became the power! There are not many people left who's ideas were formed before it went from a company to the state. If there is anyone who can give a true account to how it happened, it is an elderly proletariat.

Suddenly, the pages of the textbook return to Seto's mind, and a lunatic urge overcomes him. Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he enters the apartment with the old man. It is madness, of course. While there are no rules against talking to proletariats and visiting their apartment, it is too strange an action to go unnoticed. If patrols appear, he might plead and attack of faintness, but they likely won't believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous sour smell hits his face.

Seto now realises there are other people in the apartment, men flopped across futons and cushions and blankets. He feels everyone's eyes on his attire, knowing that his white clothes and neat hair aren't welcome. Seto crouches before the man.

"May I ask you a question?" he says.

"Of course, if you'll smoke with me like a gentleman,"

Seto sits on the couch with him, impassive about the state of his dress and any stains that may scuff it. Everyone else seems asleep, so they can talk without being overheard. Seto takes the pipe form the man and heats up the strange looking crystals inside, exhaling deeply with a biting breath. It's horribly dangerous, but there are no cyberscreens in the room.

The old man whistles. "You a smoker? You can sure choke that down,"

Seto hacks out a coughing fit. "You- You must have seen a lot of change in the world,"

"Hm, the drugs were better. And cheaper!" he agrees finally. "That was before the war, of course,"

"Which war?" asks Seto.

"It's all wars," he dismisses vaguely. He takes another hit.

"You're a lot older than I am," says Seto. "You must have been an old man before I was born. You must remember what it was like before KaibaCorp. People my age know nothing of those times. We can only read about them in books, and what the books say may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The historians say that life before KaibaCorp wad completely different than how it is now. There was the most terrible discrimination, injustice, poverty, the government destroyed the planet with fossil fuels,"

"Fossil fuels," the man nods. "I remember them. I used to work with them. They produced CO2 you see, and this CO2 would be fine, but we wiped out all the trees too so it built up and built up..."

"It isn't vey important about the fossil fuels," Seto smiles patiently. "The point is, these governments were the lords of the Earth. Everything existed for their benefit. The ordinary people were the slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you out of countries if they liked, deport you!"

"Deportations!" the old man brightens. "I remember those. A word I haven't heard in - however many years. Yes, there was a big exodus, they deported all the people, all of them! Those goons, those KaibaCorp - you people - you deported all the Jews, the Indians, the Roman Catholics,"

Seto has the feeling they aren't understanding one another.

"What I really want to know is this," he sighs. "Do you feel like you had more freedom now than you did in the old days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the government-"

"The fucking President," he spits.

"The President, if you like. What I'm asking is, were these people able to treat you as inferior, simply because you were poor?"

The old man appears to think deeply. He replaces the crystals in his pipe before answering.

"Yes," he agrees. "They would subject you under them. They demanded respect. I didn't agree with it myself, but I had to participate,"

"You have been alive a very long time. You were alive before KaibaCorp took over, before the first Battle City. Would you say it was better before than it is now? If you could choose, would you prefer to go back there or stay here, now?"

When the old man speaks, it is with a philosophic air.

"I know what you'd expect me to say," he sighs. "That being a young man was better. But I don't mind being an old man, not when aging is a thing of the past. I feel special now, you know? In comparison to all these people, who don't know what age they are, don't have the first clue even! I never took those anti-aging things... you know, the treatments? That's what KaibaCorp really did. They thought it was the duelling, and it was. It was a military company, started wars between - what did you call them again? Governments! - they started wars, so many wars. Now everything is wars because of them. Then they became everything, everything you see! Every industry, every company - there were no companies anymore, only KaibaCorp,"

Seto sits back against the wall. There's no need to go on. He stares at the pipe for a minute or two and hardly notices when his feet carry him into the hallway again. He reflects the huge and simple proof the old man just gave him. Within several years at most, how KaibaCorp took power will cease to be remembered, thus cease to be truth. When memory fails and when written records are falsified, the claims of KaibaCorp must be accepted but there will not exist and will never again exist, any standard against which they can be tested.

He stops his train of thought and looks around. A twinge of fear goes through him. He is standing in front of the elevator where he purchased the ink. He allowed his thoughts to wander and his feet brought him back here on their own accord.

A man appears behind him and he turns, seeing a benevolent face behind half-rimmed glasses. He sticks his hand out. "I don't recognised you in the corridor, you're the young man who bought-"

Seto shakes his head slightly eyes wide with fear. The man nods.

"You bought some spare parts, didn't you?" there's a mischievous twinkle in his eye that fills Seto with hope for freedom.

"Uh, yes, that I did,"

"My name is Solomon. And you?"

"It's... Mokuba," Seto nods.

"Is there anything special I can do for you here?" Solomon asks. "Or do you not know yet?"

"I was just passing," says Seto vaguely. "I just came down here, I don't want anything in particular,"

"It's just as well," he shakes his head and continues apologetically. "You see, I have an empty inventory. Between you and me, the trade is drying up. No demand any longer, and no stock either. Notebooks, paint, pencils - it's all been seized by the authorities. I haven't seen a real canvas in years,"

Solomon opens his bag to show its clutter, but nothing of value lies inside. Some broken paintbrushes, pens that don't even pretend to hold any ink, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only in the back pouch does something seem interesting.

Seto slides it from the bag, inspecting it. It's a small console, thin but weighty and with a thousand-year-old cartridge jammed in the back.

"Ah that, that wasn't worth anything even nine hundred years ago. It's a gaming console form the early 1990s, I think,"

"An antique," Seto gasps, running his fingertips over the smooth surface. "It's beautiful,"

"It is beautiful," Solomon smiles. "But an ancient technology. Something you'd need to plug into a socket - do you know what one of those is, from the olden times?"

"I'm sure I can get it to work,"

"That'll cost you a hundred yen, if you have it,"

Seto scrambles through his pockets. "Is seventy yen alright?"

Seto buys the consoles. On the top is engraved, _Nintendo 3DS_. Was this perhaps one of the first pieces of 3D technology? He'll never know, there will be nothing in the history books about this. What appeals to Seto is not so much its beauty, but having something that belonged to an age quite different than this one. The strange, cheap shell of the console is like nothing he's ever seen. It's heavy in his pocket, but thankfully doesn't bulge.

This is a compromising thing to have in his possession. Anything old is always vaguely suspect.

"There is more in my apartment if you might care to look?" Solomon offers. "There isn't much, just a few pieces of ancient tech,"

They go down, down to his apartment. Occupying the almost the entire one-room apartment is a bed with an enormous mattress. "We lived here, my grandson and I, when his parents died. Now I just stay in the elevators,"

Seto realises that it wouldn't be difficult to rent the apartment from Solomon for a few hundred yen per week. It would be a daring risk, and an impossible notion he abandons as soon as he thinks of it. But the room has awakened in him a sort of nostalgia. He seems to know exactly what it's like to sit in a room like this, utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you.

"There's no cyberscreen," Seto mumbles.

"Ah, I never had one of those, too expensive for the Big Five to fit them on these floors,"

There's a small computer setup in the corner, and Seto immediately gravitates towards it. He tries to switch it on and of course, it doesn't work. The purging of the digital age preceding the holographic age was done just as thoroughly inside KaibaCorp as outside. No data networks existed, no mainframe to plug anything into, no satellites for communications.

"Now, if you happen to be interested in old computers at all-"

"I never knew they looked like this," Seto looks around the monitor. But you cannot learn history from technology any more than you can from books, as everything that could shed light on the past has been systematically altered.

"They've not changed much throughout the centuries, that one was a 24th century home-build that my friend gifted me from... oh, Scarrab,"

"Scarrab?"

"It's a country, I think it used to be called Egypt,"

Seto shakes his head. "Never heard of it,"

Seto doesn't buy any of the parts. Even the small ones would draw more attention than the DS, unless he dismantles them.

Seto gets away from Solomon and leaves the apartment, heading home. He's decided already that after waiting a suitable interval - a month, maybe - that he'll take the risk of renting the apartment from him, trying to get the computer to work.

_Yes,_ he thinks. _I'll come back._ He'll buy more beautiful rubbish. He'll buy those computer parts, dismantle them and take them home, he'll build his own computer to communicate with the outside world, the world beyond Domino. He'll drag more information about Scarrab and Egypt and technology from Solomon's memory.

For perhaps five seconds, exaltation makes him careless, and he slips onto the floor above without so much as a glance around the corner. Or, alas, to hide the beaming smirk on his face.

Suddenly, his heart turns to ice. Walking up the hallways opposite him is Yami Mutou, KaibaCorp's best duellist. The lights overhead flicker on and off, but there's no mistaking that hair. Yami looks him straight in the face, then walks quickly on as if he didn't see him.

For a few seconds, Seto is too paralysed to move. It's an effort to finally walk. The worst thing is the pain in his stomach. He feels like he'll die if he doesn't eat something soon - maybe having his digestive system replaced isn't such a bad idea.

It dawns on Seto that by running, he could probably catch up with Yami. He could tail him until they find some quiet place, then smash his head in, the DS should be heavy enough to do that. But the idea leaves him immediately. Seto knows he cannot run, he cannot strike a blow, and Yami is muscular and fed well, he can defend himself.

All he wants is to get home quickly and sit down and be quiet.

It's dark outside when he gets back to his flat. The KaibaCorp lights off time is soon. He goes into the kitchen and swallows nearly a cupful of _VODKA_ and slathers fake, unsalted butter on stale bread. Then he goes to the table in the alcove, sits out and gets his notebook out. But he doesn't open it. He sits there, trying to shut out the thoughts from his consciousness.

It's at night they come for you. Always at night. The proper thing is to kill yourself before they get you. Many do so. But it takes bravery to kill yourself when there are no firearms or poisons. Seto curses the biological uselessness of pain and fear. It always freezes him whenever a specific effort is needed. He could have silenced Yami, but the fear of danger made him powerless to act.

He opens the notebook. It's very important to write something. He tries to think of Noah, for whom, or to whom, he's writing. But instead, he thinks of what'll happen when the Thought Police take him away.

_It doesn't matter if they kill me right away. To be killed is what I expect. But before death, there is a routine of confession. Nobody speaks of such things. But when someone is caught, they will be made to beg for mercy. Why must they endure it, since the end is always the same? Nobody ever escapes detection, and everybody confesses. Why then does the horror have to be anticipated?_


	9. Chapter 9

It's midmorning and Seto leaves his office to take a piss. 

A solitary figure comes towards him from the other end of the long, brightly-lit corridor. It's a man with tri-coloured hair. Four days have passed since he ran into Yami outside the shop. As he comes nearer, Seto sees that his arm is in a sling. Possibly, his duel disk malfunctioned, a common injury amongst professional duelists. 

They're perhaps four metres apart when the duelist stumbles and lands on his face. A sharp cry of pain wrings out of him. He must've fallen right on the injured arm. Seto stops short. Yami rises to his knees. His eyes are fixed on Seto's, with an appealing expression that looks more like fear than pain. 

A curious emotion stirs in Seto. In front of him is an enemy who wouldn't hesitate to kill him: in front of him, also, is a human creature in pain. He starts forward to help Yami. It's as though he feels pain in his own body. A word for this used to exist - _empathy_. 

"You're hurt," he says. 

"It's nothing, my arm, it'll be alright in a second," he speaks as though his heart is fluttering. His face turns very pale. 

"You haven't broken anything?" 

"No. I'm alright. It hurt for a moment, that's all," he stands. "It's nothing. I only banged my wrist. Thanks, proletariat," 

"I'm not-" 

But with that he keeps on going, as briskly as if nothing ever happened. Seto knows that both of them betrayed a momentary lapse of judgement, hiding their feelings as they always do in front of cyberscreens. Nevertheless, he finds it difficult not to betray surprise on his face as Yami has slipped something into his pocket. 

There's no question that he did it intentionally. It's something small and flat. As he enters the bathroom, Seto reaches into his pocket and feels it - a note! He's tempted to read it at once, but that would be shockingly dangerous. There's no place the cyberscreens watch more than public bathrooms, and as the toilets are Smart Toilets, there's no guarantee they aren't watching even now. 

Seto returns to his office and reads out some news reports, simply reciting random figures in routine broadcasts. 

Whatever Yami wrote to him, it must have a political meaning. There are two possibilities, so far as Seto sees. One, that Yami is handing him into the Thought Police, as he fears. The note could be a threat from the Thought Police, or a summons, an order to commit suicide. But there is another, wider possibility that arises whenever he pictures Yami in his head, that the message comes from some underground rebellion. Perhaps the rebellion exists, and perhaps Yami is part of it! The idea is absurd. 

A few minutes later, a third possible outcome occurs to him. Reason tells him the message means death, but still his heart bangs and his voice almost trembles as he speaks into the holoscreen. 

The moment his report is finished and the screen disappears, he unrolls the note. On it is written, in large, uniformed handwriting. 

_I love you._

For several seconds he's too stunned to even throw away the incriminating thing. When he does so, he knows he's being watched and the danger of showing too much interest. But he can't resist reading it once again. Just to make sure the words are really there. 

For the rest of the morning, it's very difficult to work. Lunch afterwards is a torment. He had hoped to be alone for moment during lunch, but that idiot Joey Wheeler insists upon sitting with him and talking about tournaments. He catches sight of Yami swarmed by fans, but it doesn't seem like he's spotted him. 

The afternoon is more bearable. Immediately after lunch is a delicate, difficult broadcast he must translate into Newspeak. It's the kind of thing Seto is good at and for a couple of hours he succeeds in shutting Yami out is mind altogether. Then the memory of his face comes back and with it a raging desire to be alone. 

Until he can be alone, it's impossible to figure this new development out. Tonight is one of his amateur 'duel tournaments'. He duels everyone and though he could win every game, non-professional duellists who win every time never last long, so he loses several games om purpose, winning only the occasional match. At the sight of the words 'I love you', the desire to stay alive at all costs returned to him and it hasn't yet dwindled. Taking minor risks sounds stupid, so he doesn't win every time like he'd like to. 

It's not until he's alone in the darkness of his room, safe even form the cyberscreen as long as he keeps silent, that he can think continuously. 

It's a physical problem to be solved: how to get in touch with Yami and arrange a meeting. He doesn't consider the possibility that Yami is laying a trap for him. He knows that's not true, because of Yami's unmistakable agitation when he handed Seto the note. Obviously he was terrified. 

Nor does the idea of refusing his advances come to mind. Only five nights ago, Seto wanted to smash his skull in with a DS - but that's of no importance. He thinks of Yami, naked, as he saw him in his dreams. He had imagined Yami a fool like the rest of them, his head stuffed with lies and hatred, his heart of ice. A fever seizes Seto at the thought of losing him. What he fears more than anything is that Yami might change his mind if he doesn't get in touch with him quickly. 

The physical difficulty of meeting is enormous. It's like trying to make a move in chess when you're already mated. Whichever way he turns, the cyberscreen faces him. Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with Yami had occurred to him within five minutes of reading that note, but now, with time to think, he goes over each one. 

Obviously, the kind of encounter that happened this morning cannot be repeated. If Yami shared a floor with him it might be comparatively simple, but he has a very slim idea of how many floors above him Yami lives. If he knew where he lives, and what time he's home, he could meet Yami on his way home. But to try and follow Yami isn't safe, because it means lurking around the duel arenas. Messaging him is out of the question, as it's no secret all messages are screened through an AI system to detect their contents. 

Finally, Seto decides that the safest place is the canteen. If he can get past Yami's fans and get him to a table, not too near the cyberscreens, and if the noisy conversation surrounds them for long enough to talk, they can exchange a few words. 

A week passes. The day after they met, Yami was too busy with fans. Then for three days, he was gone to oversee some tournament on a floor too high for Seto to access. Then he appears, but with a strange entourage of protection. Did he change his mind and decide to avoid Seto? 

But on the fifth day he almost gets close, finding Yami alone at a table. But then Joey calls for him, and it's too noticeable to go and sit with an unattended duelist after being recognised. Joey's silly blonde face beams into his and Seto has the vision of smashing a pickaxe right through it. 

But Yami must have seen him coming, and will hopefully take the hint.

* 

Sure enough, the next day, Yami sits alone again, in the corner. The man in front of Seto starts walking swiftly to Yami's table, and Seto follows. Two seconds later, the man is flat on is face. He glares up at him, suspecting him of having tripped him. But it doesn't matter, five seconds later Seto is sitting opposite Yami with a thundering heart. 

He doesn't look at Yami, only unpacks his tray and promptly begins eating. It's important to speak before anyone else comes over, but now a terrible fear possesses him. _Yami will have changed his mind!_

In a low voice, Seto begins speaking. Neither of them look up, simply exchange a few words in between spoonfuls. He sees Yami's tray of real food with real variety, and hatefully spits out. 

"What do you want?" 

"What time do you leave work?" Yami asks. 

"Eighteen-thirty," 

"Where can we meet?" 

Seto thinks for a moment. "Duel Arena 5, during an amateur tournament," 

"It's full of robots and cyberscreens," 

"It doesn't matter if there's crowd," Seto reminds. 

"Any signal?" 

"No," he hisses. "Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don't look at me, just keep somewhere near me," 

"What time," 

"Nineteen hours," 

"Alright," 

They don't speak again and don't look at one another. Yami eats quickly and leaves while Seto stays to get drunk before his afternoon shift. 

*

Seto is at the arena halfway through a match, before the appointed time. He sits in a relatively busy area and tries to concentrate on the game between some energetic brown-haired man and a boring-looking but attractive man Seto's age. Five minutes after nineteen, Yami still hasn't appeared. _He isn't coming, he changed his mind!_

Seto stands and weaves between the crowds, to the highest floor of the area and beyond its doors. Then he sees Yami standing in the corner, reading, or pretending to read, a propaganda piece that spirals around the column. It's not safe to go near him until more people filter out from the stadium, not that the match is over. There are cyberscreens everywhere and robots by the entrances. However, sudden shouts make both Seto and Yami run back into the area. 

The amateur match is over, they now reveal a convoy of foreign prisoners. Seto and Yami force themselves into the dense crowd. A line of prisoners sit in the arena, packed closely together. Their sad faces stare our at the crowd, utterly incurious. Some are definitely Londoners, but others are a colour Seto has never seen before, only read about. Their skin is dark! It's dark, and warm, and confusing. The entire crowd stares at them specifically like they're a novelty. Their bonds - electric lasers wound around their arms that shock you to death if breached - buzz lowly even over the shouts form the crowd. 

Yami's shoulder, and arm right down to his hand, is pressed against Seto's. He's almost close enough to feel the warmth of his cheek. He begins speaking in the same voice as before, lips barely moving, a mere murmur. 

"Can you hear me," 

"Yes," Seto stops himself nodding. 

"Are you working tomorrow afternoon?" 

"Yes," 

"Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to floor 322-" 

And with military precision, Yami outlines Seto's route: go to Floor 322, the clearance code is 5754 which can take Seto to any floor up to 350. That's where he'll meet Yami where Yami will use his clearance to get them up to Floor 370, where there exists a hiding place without cyberscreens. 

"Can you remember that?" Yami murmurs finally. 

"Yes. What time?" 

"About fifteen. You may have to wait at Floor 350, I'll get there by another way. Are you sure you remember everything?" 

"Yes," 

"Then get away from me as quick as you can," 

Yami need not have told him that. But for the moment they are stuck in the crowd. The prisoners are still pouring into the arena, ready to be tortured before the jeering masses. Foreigners, to the members of KaibaCorp and to an extent those outside of it, are strange. You literally never see them other than as prisoners. You see them murdered as enemies. Many are probably forced into the underground floors as slaves. 

The crowd dissipates and it's almost time for Seto and Yami to part. But at the last, fleeting moment, Yami takes his hand and gives it a gentle squeeze, only for a moment. 

Yami turns to leave and Seto waits there for a while. The dazzling, purple eyes of a prisoner catch his eye. One with long, unruly blonde hair. 

Seto mouths to him, though the prisoner probably can't understand his language. _'My name is Seto.'_

The prisoner is careful not to let his face change as he mouths back. _'Marik'._

 _'I'm sorry you're going to die Marik'_ he turns away and leaves a different way than Yami did. 


	10. Chapter 10

Seto walks down the hallway of Floor 350 under the lights, feeling scrutinised under their glare. The air seems to stick to his clothes, it's so humid up here. It's the second of May, but it's been years since he saw the flowers of spring. 

He's a bit early. There were no difficulties about getting up here and Yami is so evidently experienced that that he's less frightened than he normally would be. Presumably, Yami can be trusted to find a safe place. In general, you can't assume you're safer in the upper floors than in the lower ones. There are fewer cyberscreens, of course, but there is always the danger of unseen, concealed technology by which your voice or imprint might be recognised; besides, it isn't easy to walk around by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of fewer than a hundred floors, it's not necessary to pass through checkpoints, but there are always guards hanging about the main areas who examine the identifiction of anyone who passes through and ask awkward questions. 

However, no guards have appeared yet, and on the walk from his floor he made sure by discreet backward glances that he wasn't followed. 

A sound at his back freezes him, unmistakably a lone other's footsteps. He keeps on walking. It's the best thing to do. It might be Yami, or he might have been followed after all. To look round is to show guilt. He takes a step, then another. A hand falls lightly on his shoulder. 

He looks around. It's Yami. Yami shakes his head, evidently as a warning that he should keep silent, then guides Seto to the staircase and up by twenty floors. Obviously he's been this way before, as he keeps away from the windows as if by habit. Seto follows. His first feeling was relief, but as he watches the strong, wide shoulders moving in front of him, the sense of his own inferiority bears heavily upon him. Even now, it seems quite likely that when Yami turns around to properly look at Seto he'll decide to leave. 

It occurs to Seto that Yami has never seen him in good light, the kind of light in these floors. They arrive at Floor 370. Yami uses his retina scan and handprint to open the sliding mechanical doors. Seto follows him, blinded by the sudden bright light and lemon-fresh air of this part of the building. All the way up to Floor 390. Yami finds a door, opening it to a large, open-plan room. 

"Here we are," he declares. 

He faces Yami from several paces distance. As yet he doesn't dare move nearer him. 

"I didn't want to say anything in the corridor, in case there's a mic hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's always a chance of one of those fuckers recogniing your voice. We're okay in here," 

Seto still doesn't have the courage to approach him. "We're okay in here?" he repeats stupidly. 

"Yes, look at the walls," 

This is the frst time Seto notices, this a room of steel. Pure, thick steel that Yami locked the door of. He's effectively trapped inside, but also, there's no innards of the wallls to hide a mic in. 

He manages to move closer to Yami. The duellist stands before him very upright, with a smile on his face that looks ironical, as though he's wondering why Seto is slow to act. He takes Yami's hand. 

"Would you believe," he begins. "That until this moment, I didn't know what colour your real hair is?" 

It's brown. A light shade of brown that he sees up close under the hair dye. 

"Now you can see what I really look like. Can you still bear to look at me?" 

"Yes, easily," 

"I'm seventeen years old. I've got a cough I can't get rid of. I'm grotesquely underweight. I'm drunk all the time. I'm missing eight of my teeth," 

"I couldn't care less," says Yami. 

The next moment, Yami is in his arms. At first, he feels nothing but sheer incredulity. The strong, healthy body is strained against his own, the mass of dark hair is against his face, and yes! Yami actually turns his face up and Seto is kissing him. Yami clasps his arms about his neck, calling him darling, loved one. He pulls Yami down onto the ground. He doesn't resist. 

"You can do what you like with me," Yami states. 

The truth is, Seto has no physical sensation, except _contact_. He's glad this is happening, but he has no physical desire. It's too soon, Yami's perfection and attractiveness scare him, he's too used to living in celibacy. Yami picks himself up. He sits against Seto, putting his arm around his waist. 

"Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole night. Isn't this a splendid room? If anyone is coming, you can hear them all the way down the end of the corridor, but they can't hear us," 

Internally, Seto agrees, but he remains withdrawn and insecure. 

"What is your name?" Yami asks him. 

"Seto, I don't have a last name," 

"Isn't it Kaiba?" 

"I removed it from my records. My name is just Seto," 

Yami smiles. "I like your name, dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before reading that note?" 

He doesn't feel any temptation to lie to Yami. It's even a sort of love-offering to start out by telling your worst. 

"I hated the sight of you," he says. "I wanted to torture you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago, I thought seriously about smashing your head in until you bled to death. If you really want to know, I imagined you had something to do with the Thought Police," 

Yami laughs, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of his disguise. "Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?" 

"Well, maybe not exactly that. But in general - mostly because you're a duelist from the upper floors - I thought that probably-" 

"You thought I was like the Big Five," Seto nods. "That I'm pure. Banners, slogans, processions, anti-sexuality. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance, I'd denounce you as a Thought-Criminal and get you killed off?" 

"Something like that," 

"It's this thing that does it," he rips off his Anti-Sexuality sash. Then, he feels into the pocket of his jacket and produces a slab of chocolate. He breaks it in half and gives one of the pieces to Seto. 

Even before he eats it, he knows it's very unusual chocolate. It's dark and shiny, wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally is dull-brown crumbly stuff that tastes like the smoke of a rubbish fire. He tastes the chocolate and remembers that sometime, he's had chocolate that tastes like this. The first bite stirs up a memory which he cannot pin down, but which is very powerful. 

"What is this stuff?" 

"It's chocolate from the outside. I get it on the Black Market," Yami shrugs indifferently. "And actually, I am the sort of person you thought I was. I commit war crimes with every duel I win. I've killed more innocent, desperate people, than most guards ever will, even children. I spread Anti-Sexuality propaganda all over, and venerate monsters like Gozaburo Kaiba. I always yell with the crowd during Hate Week. It's the only way to be safe," 

"You didn't have to become a duellist," the chocolate tastes delightful. The memory still moves around the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definitive shape. Like something seen in the corner of his eye. "You are very healthy. You're muscular and attractive, you could have any person you wanted. What could you possibly find attractive about me?" 

"Something in your face," Yami smiles. "I thought I'd take a chance. I'm good at spotting people who don't belong. As soon as I saw your face, I knew you were against _them_ ," 

Yami talks about KaibaCorp with a jeering hatred that makes Seto feel uneasy, although he knows they're safe here if they're safe anywhere. What astonishes him about Yami is the coarseness of his language. Members of KC aren't supposed to swear, and Seto seldom swears - at least, not aloud. Yami however, seems unable to mention KaibaCorp, and especially the Big Five, without using the kind of words the history books warn you existed in the last millennia. 

Seto doesn't dislike it. It's merely a symptom of Yami's revolt against KaibaCorp, and it somehow seems natural and healthy. They keeps their arms around each other's waists. He notices how soft Yami's waist seems compared to his own. 

The light filtering through the windows, though it has no way of being so, feels hot on Seto's face, a pleasant warmth he never thought he'd feel. Yami's waist is soft and warm. He pulls him around so their chests touch, Yami's body melts into his. Wherever his hands move, the movements are fluid, not forced. Their mouths cling together, quite different from the hard kisses they exchanged earlier. 

Seto puts his lips against Yami's ear. "Now," he growls. 

They breathe fast and the smile reappears at the corners of Yami's mouth. He looks at Seto for a moment and pulls off his tank top. And yes! It's almost like in Seto's dream. He tears his clothes off, throwing them aside with the same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilisation is annihilated. His body gleams, but for a moment Seto doesn't look at his body, his eyes are stuck to Yami's smile. 

He kneels down before Yami and takes his face in his. "Have you done this before?" 

"Hundreds of times," Yami nods. "Well, dozens of times," 

"With duellists?" 

"Until now, always with duellists," 

"With members of the Big Five?" 

"With those old creeps? No. But they would if they got half the chance," 

Seto's heart leaps. Dozens of times, Yami's done this: he wishes it was hundreds, thousands! Anything that hints at corruption fills him with a wild hope. Who knows, perhaps KaibCorp is rotten under the surface, its cult of self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If Yami could have infected them with some STD, he should have! Anything to weaken, to undermine them. He pulls Yami down so they're leaning face-to-face. 

"Listen, the more people you've fucked, the more I love you. Do you understand that?" 

"Yes, perfectly," Yami agrees. 

"I hate purity. I hate KaibaCorp! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere in it! I want this entire building to be corrupt to the bones," his voice shudders as he speaks. 

"Well then, I suit you, dear," Yami looks up, into his eyes. "Because I am corrupt to the bones," 

"You like doing this? I don't mean me - I mean sex in itself?" 

"I love it," 

That's more than what he wants to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but desire - that is the force that will tear KaibaCorp to pieces. He presses Yami down on the floor. This time, there is no difficulty. In a sort of pleasant helplessness, he pulls down Yami's jeans. 

"You're... a cyborg," 

The bottom half of Yami's body is entirely mechanical. "Is that a problem?"

"W-Well how do we...?" 

Yami smiles. "My entire nervous system is intact. I feel the same way as any full-human does, more even. I can feel your touch, I'll feel inside of you," 

Seto stares, in shock, at the the metal appendage. "Just... I-I've never-" 

"It's alright," Yami reaches for his discarded clothes and pulls them over Seto, keeping his back warm. "I'll show you," 

After the act, they immediately fall asleep. 

* 

Seto wakes up first. He sits up and watches Yami sleep peacefully. He realises that he cannot call Yami perfect. He is internally ugly, a murderer and corrupt. Seto can see it in the dark circles around his eyes - they're subtle, but they're there. It occurs to Seto that he still doesn't know what age Yami is, but he always remembers him being a duelist. 

The strong body, now helpless in sleep, makes Seto pity him. He wants to protect him, regarding him with mindless tenderness. He pulls back the jacket covering them and stares at Yami's backside. While it's undoubtedly inhuman, he lusts after it as he did Joey's. 

_In the old days,_ he thinks, _you could look at another's body and feel pure love and lust._

But pure emotion no longer exists. Everything is mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against KaibaCorp. It was an act of political revolution. 


	11. Chapter 11

_If failure is defined by its consequences, then effort is meaningless._ _If revolution fails, the lives lost never existed._

~~~

"We can come here again," says Yami. "But not for a few weeks, of course,"

As soon as he woke up, his demeanour had changed. He became alert and businesslike, put his clothes on, knotted his sash about his waist and began arranging the details of their journey back. Seto leaves that to him, since it's clear he knows a Hell of a lot more about this than Seto does. The route he gives Seto is quite different from the one they came by.

"Never go home the same way you came," he annunciates, as if it's an important general principle. Yami will leave first and leave the ballistic doors to the lower floors unlocked, and Seto will wait a few minutes before following.

Yami names a place they can meet four evenings from now. It's a corridor on one of the lowest floors Seto has ever been on, therefore one of the poorest. Yami will hang out, acting like he's buying oil or something off the free market. If he judges the coast is clear, he'll blow his nose when Seto approaches, otherwise he's to keep walking and not even look at Yami. But with luck, it will be safe to talk in the crowd.

"And now, I must go," Yami says as soon as he masters his instructions. "I'm due back at nineteen thirty. I've got to put in my hours for the Anti-Sexuality League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn't it gross? How do I look, are my clothes sitting right?"

"You look fine," Seto shrugs.

Yami kisses him on the cheek. "Then goodbye, my love,"

Yami throws himself into Seto's arms, kisses him almost violently, and a moment later disappears from the room with little noise, without checking the coast - to do so would determine guilt. Even now, Seto hasn't found out his age or where he lives. However, it makes no difference, as it's impossible for them to visit one another's apartments or write letters.

*

During the month of May, there is only one occasion when they can again successfully make love. Yami knows another hiding place on Floor 122. It's a very good hiding place among the proletariats, but getting there is very dangerous. Otherwise, they talk in crowds during duels, sitting close but never side-by-side, carrying on intermittent conversations drowned out by the raised voices of those around him. Seto never thought he'd confess his love to someone while watching a POW get electrocuted to death by a duel disk. Yami appears to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which he calls 'talking in instalments'.

Even if it wasn't so dangerous, they would still barely have time to talk. Seto's working week is sixty hours, Yami's is even longer. Yami, in any case, seldom has an evening completely free.

When they meet on Floor 122, the gaps in their conversation are filled up. They sit, talking for hours, on the dusty, stain-ridden floor, one or the other of them alternating as lookouts through the door's peephole to make sure nobody is out there.

Yami is sixteen years old. He lives on Floor 387 along with thirty other top duelists. He enjoys duelling. He is 'not clever' and doesn't actually strategize, but rather has faith in his deck and his own innate skills. It's the Strategists, as Mokuba is - _was_ \- who provide him with combinations which he must memorise to use in specific scenarios. He's in love with Duel Monsters, always has been.

He has no memories of anything other than KaibaCorp, and the only person he ever knew who talked frequently about the past was a grandfather who disappeared when he was eight. At school, he had gotten into duelling and proved himself among the ranks. From the age of ten he was groomed to become the Duel Monsters Champion. He had always borne an excellent character and was henceforth paraded on front of the mases as a prime example of success in KaibaCorp.

"What is it like to kill innocent people?" Seto has killed, but never an innocent.

"Ghastly. It's boring, really. There's only so many reactions a dying person has and when you've seen them all in different orders dozens of times, it gets so boring,"

Seto learns with astonishment that all duelists are cyborgs. The idea is that they'll be less reluctant to kill, because they are not fully human anymore and shouldn't be able to relate to them on a human level. 

"We aren't supposed to connect to full-humans at all, really," he adds, before breaking into a smirk. "Well, fuck them. I don't only relate to you on _human_ level, I _love_ you," 

Yami had his first love-affair at fourteen, the same year he committed his first murder. It was with a duellist of twenty-six who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. "And just as well, too," Yami smirks. "Otherwise, he'd have confessed and outed me to them. I'd have been tortured and killed, since they changed the age of adulthood to twelve,"

Gozaburo Kaiba did that. 

Since Yami's first, there have been various others. Life, as he sees it, is quite simple. You want a good time; they, meaning KaibaCorp, want to stop you from having it; you break the rules as best you can. He seems to think it's just natural that KaibaCorp wants to steal your pleasures and that you want to avoid being caught. He hates KaibaCorp, and says so in the crudest words, but he makes no general criticism of it. Except how it interferes with what he wants, Yami doesn't care about KaibaCorp doctrine.

Seto notices that he never uses Newspeak words. Yami refuses to believe in any organised revolt against KaibaCorp, as it's bound to fail in the end. It strikes him as stupid to try and change things. The clever thing is to break the rules and stay alive anyway. Seto wonders vaguely how many others are like Yami, who don't rebel against KaibaCorp's authority but simply evade capture.

They don't discuss the possibility of getting married. It's too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction a marriage between a duelist and a non-duelist, a cyborg and a human from completely different floors. It's hopeless even as a daydream.

"What was he like, your ex-partner?" Yami asks him. 

"Joey, he was - do you know the Newspeak word _goodthinkful_? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?"

"No, I don't know the word, but I know that kind of person,"

He begins telling Yami the story of his affair with Joey. Dealing on the free market, talking to proletariats and eventually, finding one who wanted to be in a couple with him. But that is nothing more than a distasteful memory now.

"I could have handled it if it hadn't been for one thing," he explains. "Joey hated sex - but nothing would make him stop trying to like it!"

Yami begins to enlarge upon the subject of sexuality. Unlike Seto, Yami had grasped the inner meaning of KaibaCorp's sexual puritanism. It's not merely that they must destroy the sex instinct. What's more important is that sexual privation induces hysteria, which they want because it can be transformed into a political weapon. The way Yami puts it is:

"When you make love, you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a fuck about anything. They can't let you feel like that. They want you bursting with energy all the time. All this hate and jeering and worship. If you're happy inside yourself, why would you get excited about Gozaburo Kaiba and the war and duels and all the rest of this shit?"

 _That's true,_ Seto thinks. There's a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred and the lunatic credulity that KaibaCorp needs to keep everyone in line, stay in everyone all the time except by bottling it up and using it as a driving force for anger? The sex impulse is dangerous for KaibaCorp, and they turn it into fear.

They have done a similar thing to parenthood. The family cannot be entirely abolished, but they want children to turn into adults almost immediately, emancipating them from parents as young as eight and putting them in apartments with no connection to their other family members. Siblings may not live together, teenagers may not live with parents. Children of five are systematically turned against their parents and taught to report them as Thought Criminals. The family has been turned into an extension of the Thought Police. It's a device that KaibaCorp uses by surrounding everyone with informants who know them intimately.

Abruptly, Seto thinks of Joey. Joey would have unquestionably denounced him to the Thought Police if he wasn't too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of Seto's opinions. Seto recalls a particular moment between them and begins telling Yami,.

"It was three or four months after we started dating. We were lost, somewhere in the lower floors. We only made a couple of wrong turns, but we were really lost and had nowhere to go. There was nobody we could ask for directions, I don't even remember where we were going. As soon as he realised we were lost, Joey became uneasy. He wanted to hurry back the way we came and start searching in the other direction. But I found something, a flag. A flag I've never seen before, black and scarlet separated by a diagonal line. I called Joey to come look, I've never seen a flag like that. He came back, and I held his waist. I suddenly realised how completely alone we were. There was nobody for the entire corridor, not even a cyberscreen. And I thought..."

"Why didn't you just kill him?" Yami looks up. "I would have, if I thought my partner would denounce me,"

"Yes, dear, you would have," Seto smiles. "I would have, if I'd been the same person then as I am now,"

"Are you sorry you didn't?"

"Yes. On the whole, I'm sorry I didn't,"

They sit side-by-side on the dusty floor. He pulls Yami closer against him. His head rests on Seto's shoulder. The pleasant smell of his hair conquers the bad ones surrounding them. Yami is going to get so much from life just by killing people, he thinks. Yami doesn't understand that killing an inconvenient person solves nothing. Seto knows that more than most.

"Actually, no. I wouldn't have killed Joey,"

"Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?"

"Simply because a positive answer is better than a negative. In this game we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all,"

Yami pulls away from him. He always contradicts Seto when he talks like this. Yami won't accept that an individual is always defeated. In a way, he realises that he is also doomed, that sooner of later the Thought Police will catch him and kill him. But in another part of his mind, he believes that it's somehow possible to create a secret world in which you can be free. All you need is cunning and boldness.

He doesn't understand that there's no such thing is happiness, and the only victory lies in the far future, long after they're both dead. From the moment you rebel against KaibaCorp, it's better to think of yourself as a corpse.

"We are dead," Seto states with conviction.

"We're not dead yet," Yami contradicts.

"Not physically. A month, six months, a yea, maybe, and we will be. I am afraid of death. Obviously we'll delay death as long as we can. But it makes no difference. So long as we stay human, death and life are the same,"

"That's why we need to surpass humanity," Yami nods. "Transhumanism will make us machines, and then death will be nothing but a relic of the past. You talk bullshit, and I'm going to prove it,"

Yami twists himself around and straddles Seto's lap. He can feel his dick resting on his legs. Metal isn't too different from flesh, when Seto thinks about it.

"Yes, you're right," he agrees.

"Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to plan the next time we can meet. We may as well go back to the place on Floor 392. We've stayed away long enough. But we need to go by a different way this time. I've got it all planned out, I'll draw it out for you,"

And in his practical way, he scrapes together a small square of dust, and with his finger he begins to draw a map on the floor.


	12. 12

_It is nature to lose oneself in one's instinct. When that happens, interference on negative liberty is impossible._

~~~

Seto looks around the shabby little room filled with Solomon's ancient computing equipment. The bed is made, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The wires from the computer setup sprawl across the floor, some severed, some intact. The smashed monitor screens gleam in the low light. 

At the other side of the room is a microwave sitting on a small shelf. There's no way to freeze food or keep it cool. Seto turns it on and puts a mug of fake coffee in it. He places a bottle of vodka on the shelf beside it. Yami will be here in ten minutes. 

_This is suicide,_ he tells himself. Renting this room is suicide. Of all the crimes a member of KC could commit, this is the hardest to conceal. As he excepted, Solomon is happy to rent out the room to him. He's glad of the money it'll bring him. Nor does he seem shocked or offended when Seto tells him he wants the room for a love affair. Instead, he looks into the distance and speaks. 

"Privacy," he nods. "Everyone wants a place where they can be alone occasionally. When they have such a place, it's only common courtesy for anyone who knows about that place to keep it to themself. And by the way Seto, there are two entrances to this room," 

He nods to the back way. "That one leads onto an unused corridor. An old one, lost to KaibaCorp for many years now. It gives you another way to get here, if you aren't too scared of using beams to get across holes in the floor," 

Seto puts on a music downloader and it plays a strange melody. Created by KaibaCorp's music department, the song was composed without any human intervention whatsoever. It was made by AI using a process known as versification. The song is terrible, but otherwise the room would be too alien to tolerate, thanks to the absence of a cyberscreen. 

_Suicide._ He thinks again. It's inconceivable that he can frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having a hiding place that is truly their own, is too much for both of them to resist. For weeks after the time at Yami's hideout, they haven't been able to arrange a meeting. Too busy with work. 

Finally, both of them had managed to free an afternoon on the same day. But on the evening before, in the crowd while watching a duel, Yami came up to Seto. 

"I can't come," he murmured as soon as e found it safe to speak. "Tomorrow, I mean," 

"What?" Seto had felt his heart fall. 

"Tomorrow, I can't come. We have captured another prisoner, they want to broadcast their murder, I am the executioner," 

For a moment, Seto was violently angry. Yami had become a physical necessity to him, something he not only needed but felt like he had a right to. When Yami said he couldn't come, it felt like he was cheating Seto. And a feeling of tenderness for the duelist overcame him. 

He wishes they were married. He wishes they could walk together in the hallways freely, eat together at the canteen. He wishes they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to have sex every time they meet. 

That's where Solomon's room comes in. 

When he had suggested it to Yami, the duelist had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them know its complete lunacy. It's as though they're choosing to dig their own graves. 

Seto sits waiting on the edge of the bed and thinks about KaibaCorp. It's curious how the predestined horror of his death moves in and out of his mind. There it lies, fixed in future time. He can't avoid it, but he can postpone it: and yet, every now and then he chooses to shorten the interval before it finally happens. 

Yami bursts into the room. His duel disk is firmly strapped to his arm. Seto stands to embrace him, but he disengages himself. 

"Give me a minute," he takes off the duel disk and uses a small screwdriver to open it up. Inside are some silver-wrapped packs. So this is how he smuggles things around, they're inside the one thing guards would never think to check. 

He passes a pack to Seto, who feels it. Lumpy and white, it spills into his hands. 

"Isn't this sugar?" 

"Real sugar!" Yami laughs happily. "Not saccharine that we have. Sugar! And I have some bread - real bread, not ground whey. And caecilian lemon curd - that's Italian, I think - and I have a tin of milk - and look!" 

Yami places everything out on the floor to Seto's amazement, things he thought only existed hundreds of years ago. 

"This is the one I'm really proud of, I had to wrap it in silver paper to avoid AI detection, because-" 

Yami doesn't need to tell him why, the smell is already filling the room. A smell Seto remembers from his childhood, something form the outside. 

"It's alcohol..." he murmurs. "Real alcohol," 

"This is what the Big Five drink, it's manufactured outside," 

"How did you manage to get a hold of these things?" Seto picks up a _real_ apple and twirls it around in his hand. 

"There are channels from the outside to the Black market, someone really high up moving product in and out," 

Seto squats down beside him. He tears open a pack of coffee. 

"It's real coffee, not barley grinds," he notices. 

"There's been a lot of coffee about lately. They've captured... the Amazonias? Or something," Yami dismisses vaguely. "But listen, dear. Turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don't make a noise. And don't turn around until I tell you to," 

"Alright," 

"What?" Yami frowns.

"Yes, sir," 

Seto faces the wall until Yami finally tells him. 

"You can turn around now," 

He turns around, and for a second fails to recognise Yami. What he expected was to see him naked. But he isn't naked. The transformation that has happened is much more surprising than that. He's wearing a suit. 

Suits, with ties and blazers, have been the stuff of legends to Seto. An ancient tradition the history textbooks propagate as stuffy and inconvenient to the people of an older time. Yami's jewel eyes are accentuated by a deep purple tie and his body shape transformed by the structured jacket, fitted shirt that hugs him in all the right places. And shoes of a kind Seto has never seen, ones that shine and feel slippery to the touch.

The tie isn't skillfully done, rather crooked actually, and the buttons are wrongly done up. But Seto's standards on the matter are not very high. He has never before seen a person in a suit in his life. Or imagined they'd look so amazing, nothing like the clunky, fat men in the textbooks. The improvement of Yami's appearance is startling. 

"A suit, you're wearing a suit!" Seto leans in. "And aftershave too!" 

"Yes dear, and aftershave too," he shakes his head. "And you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get a hold of one for you. One that shows off your eyes. In this room, we will be people, not KaibaCorp drones!" 

They climb into the bed. This is the first time Seto strips himself fully naked in Yami's presence. Until now, he's been too ashamed of his body. There are no bedsheets, but the blanket they lie on is threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonishes both of them. 

Seto shared a double bed with Mokuba at the orphanage, but Yami has never been in one. 

They fall asleep for a little while. When Seto wakes up, he doesn't stir because Yami is sleeping with his head in the crook of his arm. Most of his suit is crumpled up, but the deep purple tie still makes him subtly handsome. Seto wonders vaguely whether in the abolished past it was a normal experience to lie in a bed like this, two people making love whenever they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying here and listening to the sounds beyond their door. Surely there was never a time when this was ordinary? 

Yami wakes up, rubs his eyes and raises himself on his elbow to look at the microwave. 

"Let's make some coffee," he says. "I'll get up and make some. You know, if I was to die right now, I'd want to drown in coffee," 

"Don't go on!" Seto pulls the blanket over his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. 

"Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter?" 

"Of all the horrors in the world... drowning!" 

Yami presses himself against Seto and winds his limbs around him as though to reassure him. He doesn't re-open his eyes immediately. For several moments, he's back in the nightmare which recurs from time to time. He sees his parents disappear. He stands before a wall of darkness, a child. In the dream, the deepest horror is of self-deception, because he knows not what's behind the darkness. He never knows what's behind it, but somehow it connects to what Yami said just before he interrupted. 

"I'm sorry," he sighs. "It's nothing. I don't like water, that's all," 

"Don't worry dear, there's barely any water anymore. Even on my floor, we struggle to have enough to shower every day. You aren't going to drown, it's impossible without a river or a lake," 

Already the black instant of panic is half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed, Seto sits against the bed head. Yami gets out of bed, fixes his suit and makes coffee. 

The coffee and sugar have a silky texture, throwing Seto back, again, into a moment of the past he cannot recall. 

Eating a sandwich and lemon curd, Yami wanders around the room, glancing indifferently at the computing equipment he knows nothing about, setting himself in the chair to see if it's comfortable. "How old do you think these computers are? A thousand years old?" 

"A thousand, probably a couple of hundred more. I don't remember what century they invented computers in. I can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays," 

"My grandfather might know. His name was Sugoroku, I'm sure he was killed," he stares at his sandwich. "I wonder what a 'lemon' is. I've seen oranges before. They're a kind of... round yellow fruit with a thick skin," 

"I remember oranges," Seto agrees. "If you peeled them with cut hands, they'd make you bleed again," 

"Gross," Yami finishes. "I'd better change back," 

Seto doesn't get up for another few minutes. The room is darkening before lights-out. He turns towards the computers and gazes into those glass monitors. The inexhaustibly interesting thing about them isn't the monitors but the configured wiring and weird metal platelets inside. There's such a depth to them, and Seto feels as though he's inside one. The computer is the room he's in, and the innards are Yami's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the motherboard. 


	13. Chapter 13

_One can only be an absolutist if they have no understanding of absolutes. One can only be an extremist if they have no understanding of extremism. But if you have no understanding of anything, all paths are open to you._

~~~

It's true, Mokuba is dead. A few thoughtless people comment on his absence. The next day, nobody mentions him. Seto goes to the Strategy Department and looks at the noticeboard. The board holds a holographic rendering of all the professional strategists. It looks almost exactly as it did before, but it's one face shorter. It's enough. Mokuba has ceased to exist: he has never existed. 

A tournament is coming. The biggest in decades. It's called the Millennium Tournament, they want to have one every year until the year 3000. Cards have to be invented, duel disks improved, Thought Criminals caught, photographs faked. In the distance, sometimes large explosions occur, ones they can see at the skyline and about which there are wild rumours. 

When they can spend evenings in the room, Yami and Seto lie side by side in the stripped bed. Naked. The room is dirty, but it doesn't matter. Dirty or clean, it is paradise. As soon as they arrive they tear off their clothes, sometimes Yami wears a suit, they make love, then fall asleep and wake up in one another's arms. 

Four, five, six - seven times they meet in the month of June. Seto has stopped drinking _VODKA_ at all hours. He seems to have lost the need for it. He can no longer see his bones so much, tempted by all the delicious food Yami had been bringing. The process of life has ceased to be intolerable, he no longer has the impulses to shout curse words at the top of his voice. Not anymore, now that they have a secret hiding place, almost a home. 

Both of them know that what is happening can't last forever. There are times when the fact of impending death is as real as the bed they lie on, and they cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping for his last morsel of pleasure. But there are also times when they have not only the illusion of safety but permanence. So long as they're in this room, they feel like no harm can come to them. Getting here is difficult and dangerous, but the room itself is a sanctuary. 

Often, they daydream of escaping KaibaCorp and getting to the outside. Or that one day, they'll succeed in getting married. Or they'll commit suicide together. Or they'll change their names, learn to speak with proletariat accents and live in this apartment on the lower floors undetected, selling things on the free market that Yami gets smuggled from the outside. It's all nonsense of course. In reality there is no escape. 

Sometimes, too, they talk about engaging in active rebellion against KaibaCorp, but they have no idea how to take the first step. Even if underground spies and enemies of KaibaCorp are real, they still have no idea how to find them. Seto tells Yami about the strange intimacy he feels between himself and Noah Kaiba. Seto has the impulse to simply walk into Noah Kaiba's presence, announce that he's an enemy of KaibaCorp and demand his help. Yami doesn't actually think of this as an impossible thing to do. He's good at judging people by their faces and it seems natural to him that Seto believes Noah is also an enemy of KaibaCorp simply by reading a flash in his eyes. 

Still, Yami refuses to believe that organised rebellion exists, or can exist. The 'enemies' are invented by KaibaCorp for its own purposes, that he pretends to believe in. Many times, Yami has executed people during duels whose names he doesn't know and whose crimes he doesn't believe in. The 'foreign enemies' KaibaCorp catches are harmless innocents of other countries. In his mind, political revolution is inconceivable. KaibaCorp will always exist, and it will always be the same. You can only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing someone or blowing something up. 

In some ways, Yami is far more acute than Seto and less susceptible to KaibaCorp propaganda. Once, they were talking and Seto mentioned that he is biased against Londonists because of the war. Yami startled him by casually mentioning that he doesn't think the war is real at all. The bombs are dropped by KaibaCorp itself. All the reports and war statistics are completely fabricated. KaibaCorp is, at most, invading and catching foreigners who are just moving around the world normally. It's an idea that has literally never occurred to Seto. 

Yami admits that he doesn't care about KaibaCorp changing history as long as it doesn't directly impact his own life. He believes, for example, that KaibaCorp invented duel monsters as they claim. When Seto explains that he believes duel monsters was invented before KaibaCorp, Yami is completely uninterested. After all, what does it matter who invented duel monsters? It's even more of a shock to Seto that Yami doesn't remember that, only four years ago, KaibaCorp was allied with the Londonists. It's true that he regards the whole war as a sham but apparently he never noticed the change in enemy. 

"I thought we'd always been at war with London," he shrugs vaguely. It frightens Seto a little. The invention of duel monsters happened before they were both born, but the change in enemy was only four years ago. He argues with Yami about it for perhaps an hour. In the end he succeeds in forcing Yami's memory back until he can just barely recall the change. But the issue still strikes the duelist as unimportant. 

"Who cares?" he groans, straddling Seto's hips in his own and flipping him over on the bed. "I know it's all lies anyway!" 

Sometimes, Seto tells him about the fake reports he generates as a journalist. It doesn't seem to horrify Yami. He doesn't care about lies becoming truths. Seto tells him about Gozaburo Kaiba, and the adoption form that states the truth - Gozaburo was forced to adopt Seto under the humiliation of losing a chess match to him. It doesn't even make an impression on Yami. At first, he even fails to grasp the point of the story. 

"So what?" he asks, his tone disinterested. "What does it change?"

"It changes nothing, because I was forced to destroy it. But if the same thing happened today, I would keep it," 

"Well, I wouldn't!" Yami exclaims. "I take risks, but only for something worthwhile, not for pieces fo paper. What could you have done with it if you had kept it?" 

He tries to make Yami understand. "It was evidence. I could have spread doubt, if I had shown it to anybody. I could have created resistance, and used it as a record to show future generations, I could have began the revolution! But in an instant, those hopes disappeared for everyone,"

"I'm not interested in anyone else, dear. I'm interested in us," 

"You're only a rebel from the waist down," he tells Yami. 

Yami thinks this to be brilliantly witty and throws his arms around him in delight. 

Whenever Seto tries to talk about KaibaCorp's principles, their Newspeak, thoughtcrime, the mutability of the past and denial of objective reality, Yami becomes bored and confused and doesn't pay attention. He knows it's all bullshit, so why let himself be worried by it? If Seto persists in talking about it, he has a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. He's one of those people who can fall asleep at any time and in any position. 

Talking to Yami, Seto realises how easy it is to present an appearance of orthodoxy when you have no idea what orthodoxy means. In a way, KaibaCorp imposes itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. Such people can be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasp the enormity of what is demanded of them. 

It's only by lack of understanding that these people remain sane. They simply swallow everything, and what they swallow does them no harm, because it escapes their thoughts almost immediately. Yami protects himself, his sanity, by not trying to understand KaibaCorp at all, simply doing what is necessary to survive while internalising that it is in fact, all lies. It's something that, in a way, Seto can admire. And something he wishes he could do. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a short chapter, but I like this one. Next one will be out on Sunday. Please kudos and comment, critique, whatever, because I like feedback.


	14. Chapter 14

_From the first move, reaching checkmate is inevitable._

~~~ 

It happens at last, The expected message comes. All his life, it seems to him, he's been waiting for this to happen. 

He walks down the long corridor on the floor of his office when he becomes aware of the presence of someone walking just behind him. A gentle hand lies on his shoulder and for a second, Seto is terrified that this is the end. The person, whoever it is, gives a small cough as a prelude to speaking. Seto stops abruptly and turns. It's Noah Kaiba. 

At last, they're face to face. It seems like his only impulse is to run away. His heart jumps. He's incapable of speaking. Noah, however, continues forward, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Seto's arm. They walk side by side, Seto listening to the metallic clicking of Noah's mechanical heels. Noah's eyes are bionic, his hands, his legs. How much of him is human, if anything? He must still have an intact nervous system, but that seems to be all. His eyes re definitely bionic, but nonetheless soft and courteous. 

"I had been hoping for an opportunity to talk to you," he says. "I was watching one of your broadcasts. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?" 

Seto has the feeling Noah stopped himself from saying 'like your brother' because, of course, Mokuba doesn't exist and never has existed. He recovers part of his self-possession. "Hardly scholarly. I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject, I just report," 

"But you speak it very elegantly," Noah smiles. "That's not only my opinion. I was recently talking to an associate of yours who is a Newspeak expert. He works in the Strategy Department. His name has slipped my mind for a moment..." 

Seto's body tenses as do his thoughts. It's impossible that he's making a reference to anyone but Mokuba. But Mokuba is not only dead, he's abolished, an _unperson_. Any identifiable reference to him would be mortally dangerous. Noah's remark must have been intended as a signal, a code-word. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he turns them both into accomplices. They continue to stroll down the corridor and Noah continues to speak. 

"What I mean to say is that in your reports I notice you used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become obsolete recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?" 

_That fucking infernal thing._ "No, I didn't think it had been issued yet. We're still using the Ninth in broadcasting," 

"Yes, it's not due to be realised yet," Noah agrees. "But I have an advance copy. Being the son of Gozaburo Kaiba has its perks. Would you be interested in looking at it with me?" 

"Definitely," Seto agrees, immediately seeing where this is heading. 

"Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reductions of the number of verbs-" 

Seto tunes out as Yami does about politics. This is boring as fuck. 

"- would you like to pick it up at my flat? I'll give you the address and the floor passcode," 

They're standing in front of a cyberscreen. The angling shows that anyone at the other end of the cyberscreen can see what he types. He hands the holographic device to Seto, who Bluetooth-downloads the information to his own device in a moment.

"I'm usually home in the evenings, if not, my robot will give you the dictionary," 

Of course, Noah has a personal robot. He walks away, leaving Seto holding the holographic device. Unlike a notebook, there's no need to conceal this. Nevertheless, he carefully memorises what's written on it and some hours later, destroys the message. 

They talked for a couple of minutes at most. There's only one meaning that interaction could possibly have - it was a way of giving Seto access to Noah's floor. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found' is what Noah was saying to him. Perhaps there will even be a message concealed in the dictionary Noah gives him. At any rate, one thng is certain. The conspiracy of enemies of KaibaCorp does exist, and Seto has reached its core. 

He knows that sooner or later, he'll visit Noah. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long while - he doesn't know. This is the crescendo of the process of Seto's betrayal. It started years ago, with that adoption form. The first step was a secret, involuntary thought, the second was the purchase of the notebook on the black market. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step is being vanquished by KaibaCorp. Seto accepts that.

The end is contained in the beginning But it's terrifying: or, more accurately, it's like the prelude to death. Like being a little less alive. Even when eh spoke to Noah, when the meaning of the words sunk in, Seto realised his body is now possessed by the singular purpose of rebellion. He is no longer a person. He has stepped into the grave, and it's no more relieving because he always knew that grave was there, waiting for him. 


	15. Chapter 15

_If feelings make us human, why don't we grasp them as instinct?_

~~~

Seto wakes up, his eyes full of tears. Yami rolls sleepily against him, murmuring something that sounds vaguely like. "What's wrong?" 

"I dreamt-" he begins and stops short. It's too complex to put into words. There's the dream itself, and the memory connected with it that swam into his mind a few seconds after waking, then was gone just as quickly. 

He lies back with his eyes closed, still sunken in the atmosphere of the dream. Trying to bring it back so he can analyse it. 

"Do you know," he sighs. "That until this moment, I believed I'd murdered my parents?" 

"Why'd you murder them?" Yami asks, almost asleep.

"I didn't. Not physically. They died to save me," 

In the dream, he rememebered the last glimpse of his parents, and after waking up, the full memory comes back to him. It's a memory he must have deliberately repressed for years. He's not certain of the date, but he couldn't have been less than ten years old, possibly eleven, when it happened. 

Seto remembers starving. He remembers watching Mokuba, made simian by thinness, silent and helpless as he sat for long periods of time, mapping out placements of building blocks for games they'd then enact with no fun or spirit attached. Like puppets manipulated on strings, their words, their actions, were not their own. Above all, Seto remembers a continuous hunger. 

One day, he remembers his parents waking them in the middle of the night. "Come on, we must hurry," they had whispered. Mokuba had whined for his doll, but their parents said they weren't allowed to bring any possessions with them, and there was a sense of urgency accompanied by heavy banging at the front door. The door smashed open into splinters, and their doorway was darkened by the shadows of villains looming into their house. 

He remembers a voice, a nebulous voice from the mass of shadows. "Enemies! Enemies of KaibaCorp!" 

They ran. They escaped through the back door and ran into the forest. They found a body of water - a river, a lake, something. A waterfall battered down on them at the same pace as the banging on their door. They swam, hiding in the cavern underneath the waterfall and the layer of rock above. His parents huddled them together, crying and shaking. He remembers the barking orders of a general, guards dressed in black appearing by the water, and his parents whispering.

"They don't know about the children," 

"Are you sure?" 

She had nodded. "They didn't see them," she assured. 

His mother had turned to him, placing Mokuba in his hands. "Go. Take Mokuba and run," 

Without a word, without a question, Seto ran. But he looked back for a single moment, and the black mass of shadows surrounded his parents. Bu at the final moment, they escaped too. They escaped into the depths of dark water. They would rather drown than be captured. 

Seto had ran, he ran until he reached the next town. He had wandered the streets for several days, carrying Mokuba on his back, until they were sent to an orphanage. 

The dream is still vivid in his mind, especially the water. His parents drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him with determined, ghostly faces. 

He tells Yami the story of his parents death. Without opening his eyes, Yami rolls over and settles himself into a more comfortable position on top of Seto. 

"I suspect you were a little terror," he says indistinctly. "You seem like you'd be an arrogant child," 

"Yes, but the point of the story-"

From his breathing, it's evident Yami is falling asleep again. Seto would like to continue talking about his parents. They looked at him, even thought they could do nothing to save him or themselves. That's what Seto admires most about them. When there was nothing they could do, they still thought of their children. Like the refugees in that propaganda film, covering their children with their arms which were no more useful to stop the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that KaibaCorp has done is to persuade you that impulses, feelings, thoughts, mean nothing. 

When you are in the grip of KaibaCorp, what you feel or don't feel, what you do or don't do, makes literally no difference. Whatever happens, you vanish, and neither you nor your actions are ever heard of again. You are erased from history. And yet to those who came before KaibaCorp, this wasn't important, because they weren't trying to alter history. They cared about individual relationships and a completely helpless gesture, a look, the words spoken to a dying man, had value in itself. 

For a moment, Seto doesn't despise those on the outside, or the proletariat members of KaibaCorp. He doesn't only see them as a force for revolution. They have stayed human. They are the only ones who have stayed human. 

"The outsiders are human beings," he says aloud, remembering Mokluba's heartless statement. "We are not human," 

"Why not?" asks Yami, who's woken up again. 

He thinks for a little while. "Not because you are bionic. Or because I cannot smile. But because... has it every occurred to you that the best thing to do is to walk out of here and never see each other again before it's too late?" 

"Yes dear, it has occurred to me many times. But I'm not going to do it, all the same," 

"That's what makes us inhuman. We value this more than our lives, we don't make meaningless gestures even to protect our own lives. We don't have any instincts," 

"I'm rather good at staying alive," Yami refutes. 

Seto hesitates for a moment and thinks that statement over. He smiles. "We may be together for another six months, or a year - there's no way of knowing. At the end, we'll die apart, not together. Do you have any idea how utterly alone that will be? Once they catch us there's nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for one another. If I confess, they'll kill you. And if I don't confess, they'll kill you all the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know whether the other is alive or dead. We'll be powerless. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that won't make any difference," 

"If you mean confessing," Yami sits up. "We'll do that. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you,"

"I don't mean confession. Confessing isn't betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could stop me loving you... that would be real betrayal," 

Yami thinks it over. "They can't do that," he says finally. "It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything - anything - but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you," 

"No," he says more hopefully. "That's true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel human, even if it doesn't change anything, then you've won. You've beaten KaibaCorp," 

He thinks of the cyberscreen with its never-sleeping ear. Agents of KaibaCorp spy on him night and day, but if you keep your mind you can still outwit them. With all their cleverness they have never mastered the ability to find out what a person is thinking. 

Maybe that's less true when you're actually in their hands. Nobody knows what happens in the underground floors, but it's possible to guess: torture, drugs, delicate instruments which register your nervous reactions, gradual torture by sleep deprivation and starvation and isolation. Facts, at any rate, can't be kept hidden. They can be forced out by torture. But if the objective is to stay human, not stay alive, what difference does it make? 

They cannot alter your feelings. They can scrutinise every detail of everything you have done or said or thought, but your feelings remain impregnable.


	16. Chapter 16

_To seize a moment of liberty before death is worth more than a long life in chains_.

~~~

They've done it, finally, they've done it!

The room Seto stands in has a velvet carpet and steel walls painted to look like dark oak wood. There is no cyberscreen. At the far end of the room, Noah sits in a deep vat of some strange thick liquid, connected to his body via wires injected into his skin. A mess of screens, chips, holographic data streams before him, he seems to be examining every piece carefully, his eyes concentrating on multiple screens at once. He doesn't bother to look up when a robot shows Seto and Yami in.

Seto's heart thumps so hard that he doubts whether or not he can speak. They've done it at last. It was dangerous for them both to come here together. Neither of them have ever been on Floor 399 before. Just one below the Big Five. The whole atmosphere is richness and spacious and smells of good food. The lifts work, silent white streams of perfect programming. There are white robots roaming everywhere. Everything is intimidating.

Every second of the journey here, even though he has a reason to be here, Seto expected to be cornered by a group of guards and beaten to within an inch of his life, like he was the time he tried to explore the lowest floors. 

Noah has a thin holographic device between his fingers and seems to be studying it intently. His young face looks both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds, he sits without stirring. The he pulls the voice recorder towards him, the same kind Seto has in his broadcasting office, and speaks in a hybrid message to the Big Five. 

"Strategy one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained cards six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antigetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message,"

He looks up at Seto and Yami and beckons them to come forward. "I can't move, you understand,"

He feels less official now, but his expression is grim as though he's displeased at being disturbed. The terror that Seto feels is suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seems to be quite possible that he's made a stupid mistake. For what evidence does he have that Noah is any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark. Beyond that, only his secret own imaginings.

He can't even fall back on the pretense that he's here to borrow a dictionary, because Yami's presence is then impossible to explain. Noah presses a switch close to the wall and all the holograms disappear.

"You don't have a cyberscreen!" Seto blurts out. 

"Yes, I don't have a cyberscreen. I have that privilege,"

His expression is indecipherable. He waits, somewhat sternly, for Seto to speak. But about what?! Nobody speaks. The seconds pass, eternities. With difficulty, Seto continues to keep his face fixed on Noah's. Then suddenly, Noah's grim face breaks into a smile.

"Shall I say it, or will you?"

"I will say it," says Seto promptly. "That voice recorder is really turned off?"

"Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone,"

"We have come because-" 

He pauses, realising for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he doesn't know what kind of help he expected from Noah, it's difficult to say exactly why he's here. He begins.

"We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some secret organisation working against KaibaCorp, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We denounce KaibaCorp. We are thoughtcriminals. I tell you this because you are the son of Gozaburo Kaiba, and we are at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready,"

Seto turns around, having felt like the door has been opened. He's right. Standing there, to Seto's shock, is Mokuba.

"Mokuba is one of us," says Noah impassively.

"What?!" Seto gasps in fright.

"Did you really believe I'd keep your secret about Gozaburo if I was orthodox? I thought you were smart, big brother,"

Mokuba sits, quite at ease. Seto regards him out the corner of his eye. It occurs to him that Mokuba's whole life has been playing a part, that he felt it dangerous to drop his assumed personality even when alone with Seto. Noah reaches over and fills glasses with what Seto thinks is liquid gold.

"This is whiskey," he explains. "All of us are older than ten? Very well, we can enjoy," Ten is the drinking age under KaibaCorp. "You'll have read about whiskey in our books, no doubt. Not much of it gets in from the outside, I'm afraid,"

His face grows solemn again. "I think we should drink in health - down with Gozaburo Kaiba,"

Seto takes up his glass with a certain eagerness. Whiskey is a thing he has read and dreamed about. But its taste is disappointing after years of drinking fake vodka. He downs the shot and sets down his glass.

"To the Dark Signers,"

"The Dark Signers?" asks Seto.

"An organisation, founded in the twenty-third century, originally against the abusive Domino State, now against KaibaCorp,"

"So the conspiracy... the enemies, it's real? Not simply an invention of the Thought Police?" 

"No, it is real. The Dark Signers, we have always called ourselves. You'll never learn much about the Dark Signers other than it exists and you belong to it. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You-"

He points at Yami. "- will leave first. We have about twenty minutes before the Big Five will expect another update on my work. You will understand that I have to ask certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?"

"Anything that we are capable of," states Seto.

Noah faces Seto. He ignores Yami, taking it for granted that Seto can speak for him. He begins asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as if this is a routine, most of the answers known to him already.

"Did you kill my father, Gozaburo Kaiba?"

"Yes,"

"Are you willing to commit murder again?" 

"Yes,"

"Are you willing to give your lives?"

"Yes,"

"To commit acts which may lead to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people?"

"Yes," 

"To betray KaibaCorp to foreign powers?"

"Yes,"

"You are prepared to cheat, to forge documents, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute drugs, to encourage prostitution, to kidnap people, to spread STDs and other transmittable diseases - to do anything to weaken KaibaCorp?"

"Yes,"

Noah blinks. "If, for example, if would serve our interests to pour acid down the throat of a child - are you prepared to do that?"

"Yes,"

"You're prepared to lose your identity and live in hiding, as Mokuaba is doing?"

Seto looks at his brother. "Yes,"

"You are prepared, both of you," he looks between Seto and Yami. "To separate and never see each other again?"

"No!" Yami breaks in.

A long time passes before Seto answers. Until he says it, he doesn't know which word he's going to say.

"No,"

"You did well to tell me," Noah nods. "It's necessary for us to know everything,"

He turns to Yami and adds in a voice that has more expression in it. "Do you understand that even if Seto survives, it may be as a different person? We may need to give him a new identity, His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair - even his voice will be different. And you might also become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. We may even replace everything but his brain with a mechanical shell,"

Seto can't help look at Mokuba's face. There are no scars he can see, but there are clear alterations. His face is longer and rounder, his eyes are a different shape, their angle has been changed. His hair is shorter and of different texture. His body shape has been changed - previously rectangular, he now his wide shoulders and a thin waist, the shape of an upside-down triangle. It's unmistakeably Mokuba, but you wouldn't recognise him from a picture or on a face ID.

Yami faces Noah and mutters agreement.

"Good. Then it is settled,"

Noah takes a cigarette from the box on the table. He inhales and instead of from his mouth, he exhales from a hole between two cylindrical pistons wired into his neck.

"You had better go back into hiding, Mokuba," he explains. "You'll see Seto again. I may not,"

Mokuba's dark eyes flicker over Seto's to say 'I'm sorry'. For what? For lying all this time? There are no traces of friendliness in his manner. He appears to feel nothing for Seto. It occurs to Seto that a synthetic face may be incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or saying goodbye, Mokuba gets up and leaves.

"You understand," he begins. "That you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and obey them without knowing why. Later I will send you a book by our leader and founder, Maximillion Pegasus. This will show you the true nature of the society we live in, and teach you how to destroy it. When you have read the book, you will both be Dark Signers. But between our general aims, and immediate tasks we give you, you will know nothing," 

He takes another drag. "I can tell you that the Dark Signers exist, but I cannot tell you whether we have one hundred members or ten million. From your personal knowledge you won't be able to say that it members anymore than four people. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. If you receive orders, they will come from me. When you are finally caught, you will confess,"

"But-"

"It is unavoidable that you will confess. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You won't betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I will have become a different person, with a different face,"

Seto venerates Noah, everything about him exudes confidence. Even Yami is impressed.

"You will have heard rumours of the existence of the enemy. No doubt, you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting in secret, scribbling messages on walls, recognising one another by code-words or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. It's impossible for members to recognise one another. And no member knows the identity of more than a few others. Even if I were to be caught, I cannot give them a list of its members. No such list exists. The Dark Signers cannot be wiped out because it isn't an organisation in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except the idea. When you are finally caught, we will not help you. The most we can do is smuggle a razorblade into your cell. You will work for us for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and you will die. We can't help you. We are the dead,"

"What about the future?" asks Seto.

"There is no distinct possibility that real change will occur within our lifetimes. Things will change, but maybe not for a thousand years. At the present, nothing is possible except to work little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation, in the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way,"

He stops, and looks at his holographic device. "It's almost time for you to leave," he says to Yami. 

Noah picks up their glasses again. "What should we toast?" he aks, with a faint suggestion of irony. "To confusing the Thought Police? To the death of Gozaburo Kaiba? To humanity?"

"To the past," decides Seto.

"The past is more important," Noah agrees gravely. He takes a pill and hands it to Yami. "It's important not to smell of whiskey. The guards are very observant,"

As soon as the door closes behind Yami, Noah seems to forget his existence.

"I assume you have a hiding-place of some kind?"

Seto tells him about the room he rents.

"That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It's important to change one's hiding place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of the book," even Noah Kaiba seems perturbed by it. "Pegasus' book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence. The Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a briefcase to work with you?"

"As a rule, yes,"

"What is it like?"

"Metal, about forty by sixty centimetres,"

"Metal, forty by sixty - good. One day in the near future - I can't give you a date - one of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your briefcase. At some point during the day, a man will touch you on the arm and say 'I think you dropped your briefcase'. The one he gives you will contain a copy of the book. You will return it within fourteen days,"

They're silent for a moment.

"There are a couple of minutes before you need to go," says Noah. "We shall meet again - if we do meet again,"

Seto looks at him. "In the place where there is no darkness?"

Noah nods without any look of surprise. "In the place where there is no darkness,"

Noah speaks as though he recognises the allusion. "And in the meantime, is there anything you wish to say before you leave? Any thoughts? Any questions?" 

Seto thinks. There aren't any pressing questions on his mind, yet he has the impulse to ask a question, any question. Instead of something related to the Dark Signers of Gozaburo Kaiba, Seto asks.

"Do you know how to get a Nintendo DS to play games?"

Again, Noah nods. "Indeed I do. Which games do you have?"

"Games... do I have?"

"You have one with no games," Noah smiles and ruffles through some drawer, handing Seto a cartridge. "I think you'll like this one,"

"Th-Thank you!"

"Now, I am afraid, it's time for you to go. But wait, let me give you one of these tablets," 

As Seto stands up, Noah holds out his hand. He gives Seto the pill.

At the door, Seto looks back, but Noah seems already in the process of forgetting all about him. He's still bathing in the weird gel, waiting to turn the voice recorder back on. It occurs to Seto that he'll be back at his work in no less than thirty secnods.


	17. Chapter 17

_The loss of history means the loss of context, means the loss of any reason to resist control._

~~~

Seto is psychotic with fatigue. Psychotic is the right word, for his mind seems to have lost all connection with physical or mental reality. All sensations seem to be magnified. His clothes burden his shoulders, the ground hurts his feet, even opening and closing his hand makes his joints crack.

He's worked more than ninety hours in five days. So has everyone else in KaibaCorp. Now it's all over, and he has literally nothing to do. He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, he walks up the dingy corridor to the room, keeping one eye open for patrols but irrationally convinced of his current invincibility. The briefcase he carries bumps against his leg. Inside it is the book.

Five days ago, the Millennium Tournament began. Its opening speech was conducted by a stern-looking man who screamed at the top of his lungs while a celebration preceding this mass execution of Londonists roared around him. Mid-speech, mid-sentence even, someone snuck up to the arena and handed him a piece of paper. His only reaction was a flash of his eyes, and he continued his sentence. Except, instead of condemning the Londonist prisoners, it began condemning prisoners from The Koreas. Seto watched him speak, standing in the crowd in the arena. And he watched everyone around him react.

The masses didn't miss a beat. Their hatred, their collective misery found its new target. Domino is no longer at war with London, nor has it ever been. It's at war with The Koreas. London is an ally, as it has always been. Seto was impressed that they changed it, altered the enemy's name from London to The Koreas, mid-report, mid-sentence even on the cyberscreens. Nobody remembered five seconds ago when the propaganda mages were showing brutal destruction of Londonist refugees.

It was during the moment of the announcement, when everyone was swallowing their propaganda, when a man with frosty blue hair that hid his face tapped Seto on the arm and said,

"Excuse me, I think you dropped your briefcase,"

He took the briefcase, absractedly and without speaking. The man disappeared into the crowds.

In response to the announcement, Seto, along with most staff, went to his office immediately. As a journalist, four years of his political reports were now obsolete. Domino is at war with The Koreas: Domino has always been at war with The Koreas. All his reports must be rectified. Although the hologram never issued a directive, he knew that any reference to war with London, or alliance with The Koreas, must be altered. The work was overwhelming, he worked five eighteen-hour days. Every time he cleared the screen of notifications, it filled up once again with reports to alter. Often it was enough to substitute one name for the other, but detailed reports required imagination. An extensive geographical knowledge is needed to place the war in an entirely different part of the world.

By the third day, Seto's eyes ached unbearably. He barely registered what he was saying, and wasn't troubled that every word he spoke was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else that the forged reports be perfect.

On the morning of the fifth day, only one screen appeared. Work was slowly dying down. Once it was blank, Seto let out a deep yet inaudible sigh. A massive task, which could never be mentioned, had been accomplished. It was now impossible to prove by any documented report that the war with London had ever happened. He wondered if the outsiders would be so easily fooled. Seto picked up his briefcase, went home and shaved for the first time since this began.

But there are better things to preoccupy his mind than the events of the past week. Now, he enters the room and although he's tired, he isn't sleepy. He opens the window and puts a pot of real coffee in the microwave. Yami will arrive soon, meanwhile he'll start reading. He sits down and unclasps the briefcase.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print is also slightly irregular. The pages are worn at the edges and fall apart easily, as if this book has passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page runs:

**_ The Theory and Praxis of Duel Monsters as a Method of Mass Control _ **

**_by_ **

**_Maximillian Pegasus._ **

**_Chapter 1 - Control with Love._ **

**_Throughout recorded time, and probably since the Middle Ages, there has been a worrying conflation of power and abuse. The hierarchies of abuse state that the more power someone has, the more they will abuse it. This power has borne different names - king, President, boss, government - throughout the ages, but the essential structure of society has never been altered._ **

**_Even after the invention of Duel Monsters, the same pattern reasserts itself, only now the powers that be have no reason to keep their abuses secret. The invention of Duel Monsters has made them omnipotent and as such_**...

Seto stops reading, just to appreciate the fact that he is reading, in comfort and safety. He is alone: no cyberscreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page in his hands. It is bliss, it is eternity. Suddenly, as one does with a book he knows he will read and re-read over and over again, he opens it at a different place.

**_Chapter 3 - Doubt All Doubts_ **

Seto begins to read once again.

**_The world was split into super powers different from their original countries - Domino, as we now know it, was once called 'Japan' and The Koreas were previously two separate states, 'state' being a term for governments. This occurred in the twenty-third century, after the city of Domino broke away from Japan and used Duel Monsters to seize the country. The holographic technology which allowed this was invented by KaibaCorp, then a company which manufacturedand sold military technology. As for London, which previously held many names - 'The Great Britain' and 'United Kingdom' being just two - came into being a century later when the main connections hub 'London City' absorbed the remainder of the country. Borders were previously guarded with nationalistic prejudice. They too were simply a construct of power, decided by the winners of war._ **

**_Different powers are permanently at war, in some combination or another. They have been so for many centuries, beginning with the elusive World Wars, on which we have very little information. War, however, is no longer a desperate, alienating struggle as it was in these centuries. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, because in some form or another, their destruction is mutually assured by the existence of technology, bionic and cyborg developments, and Duel Monsters. These powers have no material cause for war and are not divided by genuine ideological differences. They merely wish for as much power as possible._ **

**_However, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all world super powers, as such acts as raping, torture, the slaughter of children, slavery and persecution of prisoners of war are looked upon as normal when committed by the person's own side, and as atrocities when committed by the other. But was has changed, and now is fought not by solders, but by a small number of highly trained specialists, yet the casualties continue to rise. The fighting, when there is any, take part on vague frontiers the whereabouts of which means nothing, or on Floating Fortresses in the sky, made possible by technological developments allowing powers to harness the magnetic fields which surround the Earth._ **

**_In the centre of these places, war means nothing more than a shortage of goods and the occasional crash of a radiation bomb which causes scores of deaths. The character of war has changed since the last millennia. But the reasons for war have not - power over one's mind. This motive has always existed, but KaibaCorp was the one to pioneer its recognition._ **

**_To understand the nature of the present war - in spite of its change in enemy every few years, it is always the same war - we must first realise that without controlling the minds of the people, the people will recognise it as such, and therefore refuse to belong to the current powers, and will revolt against them. Therefore, even a single doubt must be snuffed out. The quickest way to do that is to encourage doubt of doubts, which by paradox is not doubt at all. Merely a lack of scepticism and critical thinking by evaluating one's situation and making judgements upon it._ **

**_This is how the powers - not just KaibaCorp, but KaibaCorp especially - reduce its people to the status of robots. But if these powers did not exist, would the structure of society by any different?_ **

**_The Big Five both recognise and do not recognise (by the principle of doublethink) that their current system reduces people to machines under the theory that this will raise the standard of living. No more disease, no more natural death, no more old age. However, this has given them the excuse not to raise the standard of living at all. No healthcare need be provided if anyone with a cough is encouraged to simply replace their respiratory system with a bionic one. Nobody starving needs to be given food, as they can simply have their stomachs replaced by a self-powering generative digestive system. The issue of starvation in our current world need not be addressed, because artificial solutions have been provided for manage the symptoms of the issue, rather than addressing the cause itself. Subsequently, the Big Five can address problems in society which they themselves created, by insinuating that they have the most efficient solution while not addressing these problems at all._ **

**_The world of today is dilapidated, abandoned, compared to the imaginary future we were presented with in the 23rd century, when Satellite, the poverty city, merged back with Domino. Prosperity reigned, we imagined a world of leisure, of glass and steel, of comfort. This would be a glittering antiseptic world whose riches were unbelievable. Science and technology continued to develop at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to believe they would go on developing._ **

**_These things developed, but only for the propagation of control. No longer was science used to advance the human race, or increase the standard of living, or reveal universal truths. The only science currently practiced is done so to increase and maintain KaibaCorp's control. It is precisely the Big Five who hate science the strongest, and therefore they must control the very method for discerning truth._ **

**_All members of the Big Five believe in KaibaCorp as an article of faith. It is to be achieved by the slow progression of human to machine, provided they can control that machine. The search to turn humans into weapons continues endlessly, by turning them into machines. Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak, there is no word for 'science'. The empirical method of thought is opposed to the most fundamental principles of KaibaCorp. In all useful science, Domino is either standing still or regressing. Books are written by machinery._ **

**_The aim of KaibaCorp is to conquer the whole of the earth and extinguish the possibility for independent thought. They therefore must solve how to discover what other human beings are thinking and they do this against their will. In so far as scientific research is concerned, the scientist of today is a mix of psychologist and biological-transhumanist. They study with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures and tones of voice. They test the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis and torture. Or they are chemists and robotics technicians, concerned only with the realms of his subjects which destroy humanity and replace them with weaponised robots._ **

**_That is why we are taught to hate foreigners. We are forbidden form speaking other languages or studying languages of the past - we used to speak Japanese, when this country was Japan, now what we call 'Traditional Japanese' could not have been understood by any Japanese person more than two or three hundred years ago. The reason for this is, if we discover that foreigners are people similar to ourselves, our hatred for them might evaporate._ **

**_When hatred for foreigners becomes dangerous, it also ceases to be continuous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Science is still carried out for the purposes of hatred against foreigners, but they fail to show any results. This is not important to KaibaCorp. Efficiency is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Domino except the Thought Police_**.

_**The Thought Police control reality. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction. But that is all. Cut off contact with the outer world, with the past, the citizen of KaibaCorp is like a person in interstellar space, who has no idea which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of KaibaCorp are therefore absolute in a way previous rulers could not be. They prevent their inhabitants from starving to death in too high a number to be inconvenient, but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.** _

_**This, although people understand it only in a shallow sense, is the inner meaning of the KaibaCorp slogan: Doubt All Doubts.** _

*

Seto stops reading for a moment. The blissful feeling of being in a room alone with the forbidden book, with no cyberscreen, hasn't worn off. Solitude and safety are physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair. The book fascinates him, or more accurately is reassures him. In a sense, it tells him nothing new, but that's part of the attraction to it. It says what he would say if he could get his scattered thoughts in order. It's the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceives, are the ones that tell you what you know already.

He turns back to Chapter 1 just as he hears Yami's footsteps outside. Yami bursts in, dumps his duel disk and collapses into Seto's arms. It's been more than a week since they've seen each other.

"I've got the book," he says as they disentangle themselves.

"Oh? Good," he says without much interest. He almost immediately turns on the microwave to make coffee.

They don't return to the subject until they've been in bed for half an hour. Yami settles down on is side and seems already to be falling asleep. He reaches put to the book, which is lying on the floor, and sits up against the bed-head.

"We must read it," he says. "You too. All the Dark Signers have to read it,"

"You read it," Yami says with his eyes closed. "Read it aloud. That's the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go,"

They have three or four hours left. Seto props up the book and begins reading.

*

"...'the same pattern has'... Yami, are you awake?" asks Seto.

"Yes, my love. I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous,"

He continues reading for some time.

"'This motive really consists...'"

Seto becomes aware of the silence. It seems to him that Yami as been very still for some time. He's lying on his side, naked from the waist upwards. His chest rises and falls regularly.

"Yami,"

No answer.

"Yami, are you awake?"

No answer. He's asleep. Seto shuts the book, puts it carefully on the floor, lies down and pulls the coverlet over both of them.

He still, he reflects, has not learned the ultimate secret. He understands how, he doesn't understand why. Chapter 1, like Chapter 3, didn't actually tell him anything he didn't already know. But after reading it, he knows better than before that he isn't insane. Being a minority, even a minority of one, doesn't make you insane. There is truth and there is untruth, and if you cling to truth against everything, you are not insane. He closes his eyes. The feeling of Yami's body on his gives him gives him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He is safe, everything is alright.

He falls asleep murmuring "Sanity is not statistical," with the feeling that this remark contains a profound wisdom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter acc killed me. I had to come up with so much other stuff divergent of Goldstein’s book for Maximillion Pegasus’ manifesto. Ugh. Still, it was fun


	18. Chapter 18

_To reject society is to reject your right to exist. Existence in society is a privilege of following the rules of that society. Otherwise, you are the dead to that society._

~~~

When he wakes, he feels rested even if he's only slept for an hour. He lies dozing for a little while.

Yami wakes up and stretches himself luxuriously, before getting out of bed. "I'm hungry. Let's make more coffee. Damn! Mine got cold. The microwave isn't working,"

"Solomon must have turned the power off," Seto shrugs.

"But it can only be turned off from this room. That's strange," but he dismisses it. "I'm going to put my clothes on,"

He begins dressing, perfectly aware that Seto is watching him. "Is it just me, or has this whole room gotten colder?"

Seto also gets up, but doesn't feel the need to dress. He holds Yami's sturdy waist easily encircled in his arm. Our of their bodies, no child will ever come. That's the one thing they can never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, will they ever pass on their secret.

He looks out at the outside, at the pale sky. It occurs to him that everyone lives under the same sky. People all over the world are staring at it, divided by lines of hatred - imaginary but very real in the wind, ignorant of one another's existence. These people have never learned to think, but someday they will overturn the world. Without having to read to the end of the book, Seto knows this is Pegasus' message. If there is hope, it lies in the proletariat! The future belongs to them. When their world is made, it will be alien to Seto, because it will be a world of sanity.

Where there is equality, there will be sanity. Sooner or later it will happen, strength will change the consciousness. In the end, their awakening will come. It's something KaibaCorp cannot kill.

"We are the dead," Seto says.

"We are the dead," Yami echoes.

_"You are the dead,"_ an iron voice behind them.

They spring apart. Seto entrails have turned to ice. He can see Yami's eyes having shot open. The duelist's face has turned a milky yellow.

_"You are the dead,"_ repeats the voice.

"The cyberscreen is inside the computers," Seto whispers.

_"The cyberscreen is inside the computers,"_ says the voice. _"Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered,"_

They can do nothing except gaze into one another's eyes. To run for life doesn't occur to them. It's unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the computer. There's a crash of breaking glass, the computer has exploded.

"Now they can see us," says Yami.

_"Now we can see you,"_ says the voice. _"Stand in the middle of the room. Stan back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch each other,"_

They aren't touching, but Seto can feel Yami's body shaking. Or perhaps it's merely the shaking of his own body. He can stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees are beyond his control. There's the sound of trampling boots on this floor and the one below. Seto looks at the corridor, it seems to be full of guards. Something is being dragged across the floor.

"The room is surrounded," says Seto.

_"The room is surrounded,"_ agrees the voice.

He hears Yami snap his teeth together. "We might as well say goodbye," Yami says.

_"You may as well say goodbye,"_ says the voice. And then another, silky voice, one that Seto recognises immediately, starts to talk.

_"Oh and by the way, while we are on the subject, your DS was bugged too,"_

Something crashes behind Seto's back. The door has been busted down. The room fills with cyborgs in black uniforms, with bodies of iron and guns in their hands. Seto suddenly realises the nakedness of his own body, the eyes on him, the desire to fall through the floor into a pit of darkness,

Seto trembles no longer. Even his eyes barely move. One thing alone matters: keep still. Keep still and don't give them a reason to shoot you. A guard appears, standing right in front of him. Seto meets his eyes. It's very strange, Seto reflects, that he notices his own nakedness so much more in the presence of these men.

There's a gasp and a kick behind him, and Seto is thrown off-balance. Behind him, a guard has smashed his gun into Yami's jaw, throwing him back into Seto. He gasps, falling to the floor. Seto dares not turn his head to look.

Even in his terror, Seto feels Yami's pain as his own. Then two guards grab Yami and drag him out. Seto gets a glimpse of his face, upside-down, yellow and contorted, with his eyes shut, and a smear of blood coming from his bust lip.

Seto stands dead still. No one has hit him yet. Thoughts that seem uninteresting come to mind. He wonders if they got Solomon too. He wonders what the others living on this floor think of this. He wonders why he didn't check the computers more thoroughly. He feels a strange urge to urinate, and realises what must have happened. They overslept, and it must now be the next day. That's what alerted the Thought Police, and they have more than enough evidence from the hidden cyberscreen to arrest them. Not that they need any evidence anyway.

Then Solomon comes into the room. Something has changed in his appearance. He stares at Seto, almost to verify his identity.

"Nobody shoot him! And nobody harm him!" he says sharply, and the guards' demeanour becomes more subdued.

His accent has changed, but Seto still knows his is the voice that came from the cyberscreen earlier. Gone are his bandana and overalls, having been replaced by a thick velvet jacket. He's recognisable, but not the same person any longer. His face has undergone tiny changes, and he no longer has a beard. His eyebrows are less bushy, even his nose seems shorter.

It occurs to Seto that for the first time in his life he is looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.


	19. Chapter 19

_The forms of betrayal don't manifest until you decide you've been betrayed. If not, an unhappy accident has occurred._

_~~~_

He doesn't know where he is. Presumably, either the ground floor or one of the underground floors of KaibaCorp.

He's in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flood it with light and there's a low, steady humming which he supposes has something to do with air supply. A shelf-like bench just wide enough to sit on runs around the wall, broken only by the door and opposite the door, a toilet with no seat. There are four cyberscreens, one on each wall.

There's a dull ache in his stomach. It's partly dread, but he's also hungry. It might be twenty-four hours since he's eaten, it might be thirty-six. He doesn't know, probably will never know, whether it was morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested, he hasn't been fed.

He sits as still as he can on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed on his knees. He's already learned to sit still. If you make unexpected movements, you are yelled at by the cyberscreen. But the craving for food is growing. It's possible, he feels in his pocket, that there's a piece of chocolate Yami gave him in there. Eventually the temptation overcomes him and he slips a hand in his pocket.

"Prisoner Seto!" yells the cyberscreen. "Hands out of your pockets!"

He sits still again, his hands crossed on his knees. He doesn't know how long he's been here. It's hard to gauge time. It might be two or three days since they brought him here. The dull pain in is stomach never goes away, but sometimes it gets better and sometimes worse. When it grows worse, he thinks only of the pain itself, and of his desire for food. When it gets better, panic takes ahold of him. There are moments when he forsees the things that will happen to him so vividly tat he siezes with shock. He barely thinks of Yami.

He knows he loves Yami and won't betray him, but that's only a fact. He hardly even wonders what's happening to the duelist. He thinks more of Noah, with a flickering of hope. The Dark Signers never try to save their members. But there's the razorblade. They'll send a razorblade if they can. He knows he'll use it if he gets it.

The lights never turn off. He knows they never do. He sees now why Noah recognised it when he said "In the place where there is no darkness," This is that place. He finds it ironic, this is most certainty underground and the lights are the lightest he's seen in the entire building.

The door is thrown open with a clang. A prisoner is thrown inside. He's shoeless. He's also several days away from a shave. The stubble gives him an air of ruffianism that fits with his large, thin body and nervous movements. His hair is long and pure white, sitting halfway down his back in long clumps. Seto immediately knows he is a Londonist - he has the same features, hair colour, eye colour, as the prisoner he watched the execution of in the theatre.

"Who are you?" Seto asks the man with white hair. Do all Londonists have the same hair and eye colour?

There's no yell from the cyberscreen.

"Ah, you too!" the man acts as if he knows Seto. He doesn't.

"What are you in for?"

"To tell you the truth - there's only one offence, isn't there?" he sits down awkwardly on the bench opposite Seto.

"And you have committed it?"

"Apparently I have,"

"My name is Yami Bakura, I came here to save my brother from execution," he says vaguely, seeming to finally realise Seto doesn't have the faintest clue who he is.

"Who are you?" Seto doesn't mean his name, and the man seems to understand this.

"I was smuggled in here on a food shipment from The Koreas, intending to rescue my brother. I'm not used to all this excitement - I'm an editor and publisher, back in London. My faction was producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. One line in a poem ends in 'God', rhymed from 'rod'. There are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the entire English language! There is no other rhyme the poet could have used, really,"

The expression on his face changes, he looks almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of a pedant who's found out some useless fact. "Do you know that the whole of English poetry has been determined by the fact that there are very few rhymes in the language?"

No, that particular thought have never occurred to Seto. Nor, in any circumstance, does he give the faintest fuck.

"D'you know what time it is?" he asks.

Bakura looks startled again. "I haven't thought about it! They arrested me two hours ago... maybe three..." he looks around. "There's no difference between night and day down here. One can't calculate the time,"

Suddenly, a yell from the cyberscreen tells them to be silent. Seto sits quietly, his hands crossed. Bakura, too small to sit in comfort on the bench, fidgets until the cyberscreen tells him to be still.

Time passes. Twenty minute, an hour - it's difficult to judge. A officer enters and points at Bakura. "Floor minus 101," he says.

Bakura leaves with the guards, looking perturbed yet confused.

What seems like a long time passes. The pain in Seto's gut comes back. He only has six thoughts: the pain in his stomach; a piece of chocolate; the blood and screaming in his vision; Noah; Yami; the razorblade. The door opens again and in walks-

"Joey?!" Seto startles into confusion. " _You're_ here?!"

Joey gives Seto a glance in which there's no interest or surprise, only misery. He walks up and down, unable to keep still. His knees are trembling. He has a wide, staring look, as though he can't focus his thoughts except at something in thje vast distance of white tiles.

"What are you here for?" Seto asks, extremely shocked.

"Thoughtcrime!" wails Joey, almost sobbing. The tone of his voice contains the admission of guilt and the horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He pauses opposite Seto and begins pleading with him. "You don't think they'll shoot me, do you? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done anything - only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give people a fair hearing. I trust them! They'll know my record, won't they? You know what kind of person I am! I'm not bad. I'm not smart, but I'm not bad! I tried to do my best for KaibaCorp, didn't I? I'll get off with five years... maybe ten. Someone like me would be useful in a labour camp! They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once..."

"Are you guilty?" asks Seto.

"Of course I'm guilty!" cries Joey, at the cyberscreen. "KaibaCorp would never arrest an innocent man!"

His face grows calmer, and sad. "Thoughtcrime is a terrible thing, Seto. It's insidious. It can get hold of you without you even knowing! Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! I never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. Then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?"

He sinks his voice, like someone obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.

"I said 'Down with Gozaburo Kaiba'! Yes, I said that! Just once of course, and I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say when they take me to the tribunal? I'll say 'Thank you for saving me before it was too late',"

He stares at the toilet and pulls down his shorts. "Uh, sorry, I can't help it,"

Seto groans and covers his face with his hands.

"Well, it's not like you haven't seen me naked before!"

"Oh, fuck off!" Seto wishes he had something throw at him, a pillow would work.

Joey is removed. More prisoners come and go, mysteriously. Once woman is consigned to 'Floor minus 101' and, Seto notices, seems to turn a different colour when she hears those words. Time passes, a few hours Seto guesses. There are six prisoners in the cell. All sit very still.

Another prisoner is brought in, a man with scars and a cavernous face, which makes his eyes look too large even as they droop. It's like a skull, partially covered by frosty blue hair. The man sits on the bench and stares right at Seto. Suddenly, Seto and all the other prisoners realise what's happening. The man is dying of starvation. There's a sudden stir among all the prisoners, who can't help stare at him like he's some irresistible attraction.

Suddenly, he speaks. "Seto?"

Seto looks up.

"You're a member of the Dark Signers. Me too," he grins toothlessly. "I have something you need,"

Seto sees something shining in the grin. Wedged, into his very gum it seems, is a razorblade.

Seto quickly reaches into his pocket and pulls out the chocolate, holding it out to place it into his mouth and quickly, in exchange, grab the razorblade.

There's a vicious, deafening roar from the cyberscreen and the man thrusts his hands back suddenly, to demonstrate to it his refusal of the gift.

"Prisoner Kiryu K. Let that chocolate fall!"

He refuses it, and Seto drops it onto the floor, in just as much panic as him.

"Stand," the cyberscreen tell Kiryu, and he does. "Face the door. Make no movement,"

"Fuck..." Seto hears him whisper.

The door clangs open and a guard, with all the force he can muster, slams the butt of his gun against Kiryu's face. It's a frightful blow that seems to knock Kiryu clean off the floor and into the toile. He falls onto his hands and knees and, amid a stream of blood, two razorblades fall out his mouth.

The prisoners sit very still, hands crossed on their knees as Seto does. Kiryu climbs back into his place. One side of his face is darkening. It swells into a cherry-coloured mass with a black hole in the centre. From time to time, a little blood drips onto his clothes. His grey eyes flit from face to face, and he gives Seto an apologetic look. He seems to be trying to figure out how much Seto hates him for losing the blades.

The door opens. With a small gesture, the guard indicates to Kiryu. "Floor minus 101,"

There's a gasp and a flurry in front of Seto. Kiryu has thrown himself onto his knees and tries to grab the blades. The guards grabs his hands instead, dragging him by them. Seto hears him scream.

"I've told you everything already, assholes! Get off me!"

Seto suddenly realises that Kiryu is the man who gave him the briefcase.

"You've been starving me for weeks. I even did your dirty work and entrapped that kid. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me already, cowards! But not Floor minus 101!"

The officers wordlessly drag him out. The prisoners still sit quietly, including Seto.

A long time passes. Seto is alone, and has been for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow bench is so bad that he stands up and walks round the cell, unreproved by the cyberscreen. The piece of chocolate still lies there, wrapped up and intact. He doesn't look at it, as hunger gives way to thirst. His mouth is sticky and tastes awful. He drifts in an out of fatigue. He'll stand up because the pain in his bones is too much to bear, then dizziness will overcome him and he'll sit back down.

He thinks of Yami. Somewhere or other he is suffering, maybe worse than Seto is. He asks himself. "If I could save Yami by doubling my own pain, would I? Yes, I would,"

The door opens. Noah comes in. Seto startles to his feet.

"They got you too!" he cries.

"They got me a long time ago," Naoh gulps and turns, lifting his hair to reveal a system of covered wires embedded somewhere in his skull. "Father, Gozaburo, he noticed me becoming a Thought Criminal. Why do you think he adopted you? You were to be the heir he knew I could never be. But it'd be too much of an embarrassment to kill me, so... he reversed my age, gave me an apartment, and turned me into his puppet. Now, if I don't act as Head of the Thought Police, if I act on any of my bad thoughts, my life support will shut down. I'll die,"

Seto fixes him with a look of abject betrayal.

"You knew this, Seto," he starts to cry. Really, genuinely cry. "I hate myself for this. But you must have known. You were just fooling yourself. You've always known what I am..."

Yes, Seto sees now. He always knew it. But there's no time for that now. His eyes fix on the razorblades still on the floor. He lunges for them, but before he can, a guard appears from behind Noah and slams his ankle with his gun, breaking it.

Seto falls to the side, clutching his leg. Everything explodes into light. It's inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain. No, it's the accumulation of all his pain, physical and emotional.

The light clears and he can see the other two looking down at him. One question, at any rate, is answered. Nothing in this world is so bad as pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, he thinks as he writhes on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled leg.


	20. Chapter 20

_If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear, does it make a sound? If a scrap of paper is destroyed and nobody remembers it, did it ever really exist?_

~~~

He's lying on a large metal sheet, about 5 feet off the ground. Thick iron bars strap him down in a way that he can't move any body part more than an inch. A very strong light, the strongest he's seen, fixes on his face. Noah stands at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stands a man in a white coat, holding a syringe.

He has been drifting in and out of consciousness, has no idea how long it's been since coming here. The intervals of unconscious darkness could be days, weeks, he doesn't know.

There is always a preliminary confession. A list of charges was read to him when he arrived - conspiracy, espionage, collusion, sabotage and such - and he was asked to confess. He denied, and was tortured. Sometimes with holographic duel monsters that terrified him. Sometimes with electric shocks. Sometimes with beatings by men with steel rods. Eventually, even the sight of a black uniform is enough to make him wince and beg for mercy. Still, he keeps the resolve of confessing to nothing all through the torture. He tells himself, _I will confess, but not yet. I won't confess until the pain becomes unbearable. Two more shocks, one more, and I'll tell them what they want._

The torture becomes less frequent and instead, there are long periods of lying in a hospital like this one, with a businesslike doctor not saying a word. He has no idea what has been done to his body, hasn't seen a mirror or been able to touch himself in who knows how long. His questioners are KaibaCorp intellectuals, but he's yet to meet a member of the Big Five. These men are more cruel than the guards. They pull his hair, make him stand on one leg, refuse to let him urinate, shine glaring lights in his face. They keep him in constant slight pain, trying to destroy his power of arguing nd reasoning.

Their real weapons is merciless questioning that goes on for hours, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything he says, accusing him at every interval of lies and self-contradictions. They do this until he breaks down crying, sometimes several times in one session.

Sometimes, however, they appeal to him. They call him endearing names like Yami did, talk about Gozaburo Kaiba and ask if he has enough loyalty left to want to undo the evil he's done. When his nerves are so shot, every appeal reduces him to snivelling tears. He becomes simply a body, an inanimate object that does what his questioners demand of him.

His sole concern is to find out what they want him to confess, and then confess it quickly to be killed quickly. He confesses to the assassination of Gozaburo Kaiba, to his affair with Joey. He also confesses to imaginary crimes, that he's a spy from London and has been selling them military secrets. He confesses to having sex, to being an admirer of anarchism. He confesses to having murdered Yami, although him and his questioners know Yami is still alive. He confesses that he's been in personal touch with Maximillian Pegasus. It's better to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it's all true. He's an enemy of KaibaCorp and in their minds, there's no difference between the thought and the deed.

He's strapped onto the metal sheet surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A scientist reads the dials.

He looks up to see Noah. He knows Noah has been controlling everything, watching from the cyberscreens. He's been deciding Seto's treatment down to the minute detail, though even Noah is being controlled. He feels that even the back of his head is held in a vice grip of iron. Noah looks down at him gravely and rather sadly. His face looks coarse and worn, tired lines and black rings under his eyes.

Noah is clearly a lot older than Seto thought. His physical age has been reversed by technology, and he has been prevented from ageing at all. But there are things that give him away, tiny lines the drugs and augmentations couldn't reduce, certain expressions of wisdom. Seto would place him, imagining his real age, at around 25-30. His hand is on a lever.

"I told you," Noah states. "That if we meet again, it will be here,"

"Yes," agrees Seto.

Without warning, Noah pushes the lever down and a wave of pain floors through Seto's body. It's terrifying because he can't see what's happening, what's causing it. He has the feeling that some mortal injury is being done to him. His body is writhing, he doesn't know if it's really happening or if it's being electrically stimulated to do so. He sets his teeth and breathes from his nose, trying to stay as silent as possible.

"You are afraid," says Noah. "Afraid that in a moment, you're going to die. That is what you're thinking, isn't it Seto?"

Seto doesn't answer. Noah lifts the lever up and the wave of pain recedes quickly.

"That was forty," Noah states. "You can see the numbers on this dial run up to one hundred. Please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have the power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to whatever degree I choose. If you tell me any lies, hide the truth, or even fall below your usual level of intelligence, you will cry out in instant pain. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," says Seto.

Noah becomes less severe. He looks thoughtful, and his voice is kind when he speaks once again. "Do you have any questions?"

"Where's Mokuba?"

"Mokuba escaped," Noah admits with a sigh. "He escaped the He was dead from the moment he became an unperson, disappeared from your life. What you met on my floor was a customised robot,"

Tears well in Seto's eyes. Before, Mokuba was an unperson, but he may still have been alive somewhere. Although his brother felt no love for him, Seto's newfound humanity makes him regret every moment with Mokuba that he took for granted.

"Who was Kiryu Kyosuke?" Seto asks, as a way to distract form this.

"An outsider, a member of the real Dark Signers," he frowns with regret. "He was smuggled in with some supplies on the black market. He found out about you somehow and gave you the real book - we were intending to give you one we had prepared. He also attempted to help you commit suicide, another thing we never intended to happen. That was a mistake on my part, and one I paid for,"

 _It must have been Yami_ , Seto thinks with gratitude. _He must have told his connections on the outside about me_ _and sent Kiryu in with the book and a razorblade._

"Why are you here? You could have handed me other to the Thought Police and fucked off back to your bath of goo. Why are you taking the time to talk to me?"

"Because you are worth my trouble," Noah explains. "The Big Five don't understand it, but they gave me permission to decide your fate when I asked them to,"

"Why?" Seto doesn't understand it either.

"Because there are a lot of problems with you. You suffer from a defective memory. You cannot remember real events and instead remember fake events. And even now, you cling to this disease of delusion as if it is a virtue. For example, at this moment, what power is Domino at war with?"

"When I was arrested, Domino was at war with The Koreas,"

"With The Koreas. Good. And Domino has always been at war with The Koreas, right?"

Seto opens his mouth to speak, but he cannot. He cannot knowingly lie. And he can't take his eyes off the dial.

"The truth, please, Seto. _Your_ truth. Tell me what you think you remember,"

"Only until a week before I was arrested, we were at war with London and allied with The Koreas. That lasted for four years. Before then-"

Noah stops him with a movement of the hand. "Another example. Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that Gozaburo Kaiba lost a chess game to you, and adopted you on the basis of that loss. You believed that you had documentary evidence that proved this. You had a hallucination about an adoption form that you believed you held in your hands. It was something like this,"

Noah holds the document near Seto only for a second. The document Gozaburo destroyed, it's unmistakably that. Seto sees the words he knows he remembers, in the order he remembers.

"It exists!" he cries.

"No," Noah walks over and sets the paper on fire. It vanishes in a flash of flame.

"Ashes," he says. "Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It doesn't exist. It never existed,"

"But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it,"

"I do not remember it," Noah shakes his head.

Seto's heart sinks. That is _doublethink_. He has a feeling of deadly helplessness. He doesn't know if Noah is lying and it doesn't matter. But it's possible he really has forgotten the photograph. Perhaps _doublethink_ has really happened and if so, Noah has forgotten even forgetting it.

"Is it your opinion, Seto, that your past has real existence?"

Again, the feeling of helplessness descends upon him. His eyes look at the dial. He has no idea whether to answer 'yes' or 'no'. He doesn't even know which answer is true.

Noah smiles faintly. "You aren't a metaphysician, Seto. Until now, you've never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely: does the past exist concretely in space? Are the events of the past still happening?"

"No,"

"Then where does the past exist, if at all?"

"In records. It is written down,"

"In records. And-?"

"In the mind," Seto states with conviction. "In memory,"

"In memory. Very well then. We, KaibaCorp, control all memories, and we control all records. Then we control the past, do we not?"

"But how can you stop people remembering things?" Seto cries miserably. "How can you control memory? You haven't controlled mine!"

Noah's manner grows stern again. He lies his hand on the dial.

"On the contrary," he glares down at Seto as if he's an errant child. " _You_ haven't controlled it. That's why you're here. Because you have failed in controlling it. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. You believe that reality is objective, external, existing in its own right. But I tell you, Seto, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind. Not the individual mind. Only in the mind of KaibaCorp, which is collective and immortal. What KaibaCorp says is truth _is_ truth. That is a fact you have got to re-learn, Seto. You must become sane,"

He pauses for a few moments, allowing what he said to sink in.

"Do you remember," he continues. "writing in your diary that 'Freedom is the freedom to say two-plus-two make four'?"

"Yes," says Seto.

Noah holds up his hand, his other still resting on the dial.

"How many fingers am I holding up, Seto?"

"Four,"

The word ends in a gasp of pain. The needle on the dial has shot up to fifty. The air tears into Seto's lungs. Noah draws back the dial to thirty, and the pain is only eased a little.

"How many fingers, Seto?"

"Four!"

The needle goes up to sixty.

"How many fingers Seto?"

"Four! Four! What else can I say, four!"

The needle rises again, but he doesn't look at the number.

"How many fingers, Seto?"

"Five! Five! Five!"

Noah sighs. The pain spikes to unbearable. "No, Seto. You're lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?"

"Four, five, four! Anything you like, just stop it! Stop the pain!"

Abruptly he's sitting up with Noah's arms around his shoulders. The iron bars holding down his body are loosened and he clings to Noah the moment they are. He's freezing, his teeth chatter, he's shaking uncontrollably and he feels the tears running down his face. He's curiously comforted by Noah's body, clutching the cyborg's shoulders.

Seto knows that Noah is his protector. The pain comes from outside. It's Noah who will save him from the pain.

"You're a slow learner, Seto," Noah says gently.

"H-How can I help it?" he sobs. "How can I help it? Two and two make four!"

"Sometimes, Seto. Sometimes they make five. Sometimes three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It isn't easy to become sane,"

He lies Seto back down. The iron bars hold him down again. The pain and cold have gone, leaving him only weak and trembling.

"Again, we'll try again,"

The pain flows into Seto's body once again. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He closes his eyes this time. He knows Noah is still holding up his fingers - four fingers. All that matters is to stay alive until the pain stops. He doesn't know whether he's crying or not. The pain reduces again. He opens his eyes. Noah has drawn back the lever.

"How many fingers, Seto?"

"Four. I suppose there are four. I'm trying to see five,"

"Are you trying to persuade me you're seeing five, or trying to really see them?"

"To persuade you,"

"Again, we'll try again,"

Perhaps the needle is at eighty or ninety. Seto can't even remember why the pain is happening. Behind his eyes, numbers blur and weave in and out of one another. He tries to count them, but can't remember why. He only knows that it's impossible to count them and that this is somehow due to the mistaken identity between four and five. The pain dies down again. When he opens his eyes, he sees the same thing: innumerable fingers, crossing and recrossing. He closes his eyes again.

"How many fingers am I holding up, Seto?"

"I don't know. Four, five, six. I don't know,"

"Better," smiles Noah.

A needle slips into his arm. The pain is forgotten. Seto looks up gratefully at Noah. If he could move, he'd move his hand and take Noah's in his own.

It doesn't matter whether Noah is a friend or an enemy. He's a person Seto can talk to. Noah has tortured him to the edge of lunacy, but it doesn't matter. Seto realises that he doesn't care about being loved. He cares about being understood. Noah understands him, and even though he'll certainly kill him, to be understood is more than enough.


	21. Chapter 21

_Analysis of reality is independent of metaphysical knowledge until reality is reduced to the most basic components of existence. In that case, reality depends on endless reduction of epistemology._

*

"Do you know where you are, Seto?"

"Underground. Beyond that, I don't know,"

"Do you know how long you've been here?"

"I don't know - days, weeks, months. I think it's months,"

"And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?"

"To make them confess,"

"No, that is not the reason. Try again,"

"To punish them,"

"No!" Noah's face has become both shocked and offended. "No, to cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Seto, that nobody we bring here ever leaves uncured? We aren't interested in the stupid crimes you've committed. KaibaCorp isn't interested in the act: the thought is all we care about. We do not destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean why that?"

Seto is momentarily terrified that Noah will turn the dial out of sheer anger. But the cyborg continues less vehemently.

"We do not make martyrs! We do not force false confessions and then murder based on those. All confessions uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us, actors in the name of dissent. You must stop imagining that a revolution will vindicate you. Nothing will remain of you. We will erase you in the past as much as the future,"

"Then why torture me?"

Noah smiles slightly.

"You are a flaw in the pattern, Seto. We are not content with obedience or submission. We demand the surrender of free will. We do not destroy the heretic who resists us: as long as he resists us we do not destroy him. We convert him, capture his inner mind, reshape him. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to KaibaCorp that an erroneous thought exists anywhere. No matter how severe or how powerless. We make the brain perfect before we blow it out. We did that to Mokuba,"

Seto's eyes widen.

"In the end, he begged to be killed quickly. So he'd die while his mind was still clean,"

"Did he-" Seto pauses, terrified to utter the following words. "Did he tell you?" _About Gozaburo?_

"He did," Noah smiles sadly. "The moment we brought him here. He couldn't take the slightest of pressures before he told us,"

_You're lying,_ Seri knows his brother. He knows that isn't true.

"Things will happen to you here from which you won't recover. You will be forever trapped by us. Even if we let you live a hundred years, never again will you be capable of any human thought. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, of friendship, the joy of living. No laughter or curiosity, or courage or integrity will remain. You will be hollow. And then we will fill you with ourselves,"

Seto is aware of some heavy apparatus being pushed behind his head.

"Three thousand,"

Two soft pads press against Seto's head. There is pain coming, a new kind of pain. Noah lies a hand on Seto's.

"This time it won't hurt. Keep your eyes on mine,"

At this moment there's a devastating explosion, but it's unclear whether there is any noise. There's a blinding flash of light. Seto isn't hurt, only paralysed. A painless blow has paralysed his entire body. Suddenly, he feels an emptiness that can't be filled, and all that remains are his intellectual thoughts.

"It won't last," Noah states. "Look me in the eyes. Which country is Domino at war with?"

Seto thinks. He knows what is meant by 'Domino' - that's where KaibaCorp is. He also remembers the names 'London' and 'The Koreas'. But which one Domino is at war with, he has no idea.

"I don't remember,"

"Domino is at war with The Koreas. Do you remember that now?"

"Yes,"

"Domino has always been at war with The Koreas. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of Domino, the war has continued without a break and it has always been the same war. Do you remember that?"

"Yes,"

"Seven years ago, you created a legend about beating Gozaburo Kaiba in a chess match. You pretended you saw a paper proving that he adopted you because he lost that match. No such paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe it. Do you remember inventing it?"

"Yes,"

Noah holds up his hand, showing four fingers. "There are five fingers here. Do you see five fingers?"

"Yes,"

Everything Noah says fills up that patch of emptiness and becomes truth. Two and two can make five, if that's what is needed. Or can easily make three, if that's what is needed.

"You see now, that it is possible,"

"Yes," says Seto.

"Do you remember writing in your diary," Noah begins. "That it doesn't matter if I'm a friend or enemy, becuse at least I'm someone you can talk to and who understands you? Well, you're right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It is just like my mind, except you happen to be insane. Before we bring this session to an end, you can ask me some questions, if you like,"

"Any question I want?"

"Any question you want," he sees that Seto is looking at the dial. "It's switched off. What is your first question?"

"What have you done with Yami?"

"He betrayed you, Seto. Immediately. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case,"

"Did you torture him?"

Noah leaves this unanswered. "Next question,"

"Does Noah exist?"

Noah laughs. "I am KaibaCorp. Of course I exist,"

"Does Noah Kaiba - do you exist in the same way that I exist?"

"You do not exist," says Noah.

"I think I exist," he says wearily. "I an conscious of my own existence. I was born, I shall die. I occupy a particular point in space. No solid object can occupy the same point as me. In that sense, do you exist?"

"It is of no importance. I exist,"

"Will you ever die?"

"Of course not. How can I die? Next question,"

"Do the Dark Signers exist?"

"They do. But you won't know that when you leave, if we let you leave. You know it now, and you will never know it again,"

Seto lies silent. He still hasn't asked the first question that came to mind. He looks at Noah and thinks Noah knows what he's going to ask.

"What is in Floor Minus 101?"

The expression on Noah's face doesn't change. He answers. "You know that, Seto. Everyone knows what is in Floor Minus 101,"

He backs away. Evidently, the session has ended. A needle jerks into Seto's arm. He sinks almost instantly into deep sleep.


	22. Chapter 22

_The argument from incredulity is not sufficient to dismiss revolution. In the same matter, those with unfounded confidence overuse this argument to maintain and reinforce that confidence._

*

"There are three stages into your re-integration," Noah states. "There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter into the second stage,"

As always, Seto is lying on the sheet. But his bonds are looser. He can move his knees and his head and his arms up to the elbow. The dial, also, is less terrifying. It's mainly used when Seto shows stupidity, and he can evade it if he's quick-witted enough. Sometimes they get through entire sessions without use of the dial. He can't remember how many sessions there have been. The intervals between them might be days, they might be an hour or two.

"As you lie there," begins Noah. "You have wondered - even asked me - why KaibaCorp should care so much about you. And when you were free, you asked the same thing. You understood the mechanics of KaibaCorp but not the underlying motives behind it. Do you remember writing in your diary: 'I understand how. I do not understand why'?"

Seto nods.

"You have read the book: Pegasus' book, or part of it at least. Did it tell you anything you didn't already know?"

"Is it true, what it says?" asks Seto.

"As description, yes. But there will never be a proletariat revolution or the overthrow of KaibaCorp. KaibaCorp is forever. It cannot be overthrown. You must abandon your dreams of violent uprising," he gets closer to Seto. "Forever. Now tell me Seto, why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why do we want power? Go on, speak,"

Seto doesn't speak for another moment or two. "You are ruling us for our own good. You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-"

A pang of pain shoots through his body. Noah has pushed the lever up to thirty-five.

"That was stupid, Seto, stupid!" he says. "You should know better than to say a thing like that,"

He takes the level off and continues. "Now I will tell you the answer. KaibaCorp seeks power entirely for its own sake. We aren't interested in the good of others, we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or happiness, only power. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

Seto is struck, as he always is, by the tiredness of Noah's face. It's full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion, but it's tired.

"You are thinking," he begins. "That my face is tired. That I talk of power, and yet I'm not even able to prevent the decay of my own body no matter how much I de-age myself. You're wrong. I have the power to be in the body if a four, five, six year old. But that doesn't matter. I don't matter. KaibaCorp matters, the individual does not. KaibaCorp has power over matter. We turn humans into robots, and robots into murderers. Already our control over matter is absolute,"

"But how can you control matter?!" he blurts out. "You're just a building! You can't control the law of gravity, or the climate,"

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the mind, Seto. There is nothing we cannot do. Invisibility, levitation - anything. I could float off this floor like a bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because KaibaCorp does not wish it. You must get rid of these 29th-centruy laws of nature. We make the laws of nature,"

"But you don't! You aren't even masters of this planet. What about London and The Koreas - why haven't you conquered them yet?"

"Unimportant. We will conquer them when it suits us. And if we don't, what difference does it make? We can shut them out of existence: Domino can become the world,"

Seto doesn't say anything. Noah continues as if answering an unspoken objection.

"For the purposes of exploration, wars, control, we can assume Domino is not the only country that exists on the world. But we can make it so. Have you forgotten _doublethink_?"

Seto lies back on the sheet. Whatever he says, the swift answer prevails. And yet he knows he's in the right. The belief that nothing exists except inside one's own mind - surely there must be a way to demonstrate that it's false? A faint smile twitches at the ends of Noah's mouth.

"I told you, Seto," he chuckles. "That metaphysics is not your strong point. The power we have is not over existence in itself, but over men. How does one man assert his power over another, Seto?"

Seto thinks. "By making him suffer,"

"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain. Power is tearing human minds to pieces and rebuilding them in your own image. Do you begin to see what kind of world we are creating? It's the exact opposite of utopia. We are creating a world of fear and torment, which will grow more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards pain,"

"You have caused enough pain to be in power - what more can you do?"

"We will destroy everything but ourselves. We have cut links between child and parent, between partners. No one dares trust a wife or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives or friends. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Our neurologists are at work on it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to KaibaCorp. There will be no love except the love of Gozaburo Kaiba. There will be no art, no literature, no science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity or enjoyment for the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But - don't forget this, Seto - there will always be the intoxication of power,"

Seto can't say anything. His heart is frozen. Noah goes on:

"That will always be forever. The enemy will always exist to be defeated. Everything that you have undergone since you arrived here will continue, and it will get worse. It will be a world of terror and triumph of power. The more power KaibaCorp has, the less it will be tolerant. Yet the enemies will live forever, even as they are defeated. That is the world we will create,"

Seto has recovered enough to speak. "You can't,"

"What do you mean by that?"

"You can't create such a world. It's impossible,"

"Why?"

"It would never endure!"

"Why not?"

"It would commit suicide,"

"Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference does it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? Even en mass, it doesn't matter. KaibaCorp is immortal,"

Seto dreads that if he persists with disagreement, Noah will turn the dial again. Yet he can't keep silent. Without arguments, with nothing but the horror of such a world as Noah envisions, he protests. "I don't know - I don't care. Somehow, someone will defeat you. Life will defeat you,"

"We control life, Seto, at all its levels. Life is KaibaCorp. The outsiders are outside - irrelevant,"

"I don't care. In the end, we'll beat you. Sooner or later, they'll see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces,"

"Do you have any evidence this is happening? Or any reason why it should?"

"No, but I believe it. I know you will fail. Humanity will win,"

"Do you consider yourself a human, Seto?"

"Yes,"

"Then you are the last human. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent," his manner changes and he says more harshly. "And you believe you are morally superior to us?"

"Yes, I consider myself superior,"

"Get up from the bed,"

The iron bars have loosened themselves. Seto lowers himself to the floor and stands up unsteadily.

"How long has it been since you saw yourself?"

"Since before I arrived,"

"You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes,"

Seto can't remember any time since being arrested that he's taken off all his clothes at once. He slides the yellowing rags to the floor and sees the three-sided-mirror in the corner of the room. He approaches it and stops short. An involuntary cry sounds from his body.

"Go on. Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side-view as well,"

He stopped because he was frightened. A grey, skeleton-like thing stares back at him from the mirror. Its appearance is frightening, and not merely the fact that he knows its himself. He moves closer to the glass. A forlorn face with a broken nose and bruised cheekbones above which the eyes are fierce and watchful. Certainly its his own face, but it seems like that has changed more than he has inside. The emotions is registers will be different than the ones he feels.

Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his skin has gone grey with dirt. Under the dirt, the surface of his skin is littered with red scars. The truly frightening thing is that before coming here, he thought he was starved. Now the barrel of his ribs is narrow as that of a skeleton, his neck doubles under the weight of his skull. His thighs are thinner than his ankles. His thin shoulders are hunched forward to make a curvature of the chest. He sees what Noah meant about seeing the side-view.

"You have thought sometimes," Noah begins. "That you can tell my real age from my face. What do you think of your own face?"

He seizes Seto's arm and spins him around to face Noah.

"Look at the condition you're in. Look at the dirt all over your body. Do you know how bad you smell? You probably stopped noticing. I can make my thumb and forefinger meet around your bicep. I could snap your neck with my hands. Do you know that you weigh forty-five kilograms right now? Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left,"

Seto stares up at him impassively.

"You are rotting away. You are falling to pieces. What are you? Not even dying, but dead. If you are human, that is humanity. Dead. Now put your clothes on again,"

Seto dresses himself with slow, stiff movements. Until how he hadn't noticed how thin and weak he has become. Only one thought remains in his mind: he must have been here longer than he imagined. He collapses onto the sheet, sitting on his side, and bursts into tears.

Noah lays a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly. "It won't last forever. You can escape from this. Everything depends on you,"

"You did it!" he accuses. "You reduced me to this state,"

"No, Seto. You reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you became an enemy of KaibaCorp. Nothing has happened that you did not forsee,"

He pauses and then goes on.

"We have beaten you, Seto. We have broken you. You have seen your body. Your mind is in the same state. You have screamed with pain. You have collapsed on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?"

Seto stops crying. He looks up at Noah. "I haven't betrayed Yami,"

Noah looks down at him thoughtfully. "No, that's true. You have not betrayed Yami,"

This is why he thinks of Noah as he does. Never does Noah fail to understand what is said to him. Anyone else would think he _has_ betrayed Yami. He has told them everything about their relationship. Every detail of Yami's black market connections to the outside, his adulterous affairs with other duelists. And yet he hasn't betrayed Yami. He hasn't stopped loving him, his feelings for the duelist remain the same. Noah sees what he meant without the need for any explanation.

"Tell me," Seto gulps. "How soon will you kill me?"

"It might be a long time," says Noah. "You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end, I will shoot you,"


	23. Chapter 23

_Stupidity is a state of regression. Deliberate regression can never occur, however the complexity of human thought is as reducible as politics._

~~~

He's getting better. He's growing stronger, gaining weight, gaining some understanding of things.

He's been moved a a new cell. The white light continues to hum down on him without respite, but the cell itself is much more comfortable than the previous ones. There's a pillow and a mattress, and a stool to sit on. The guards allow him frequent baths with warm water in a basin. He has new clothes that even somewhat resemble a suit, at his own request. They pulled out the remnants of his teeth and he now has a white set of new bionic ones, fused into his skull.

If he was interested in doing so, he could keep time. He gets fed at seemingly regular intervals, every few hours. And he can assume that is three meals in twenty-four hours. The food is surprisingly good. Once, he's sure he had meat, but the guard never answered when he asked.

He sleeps a lot, even under the harsh light. He always escapes into his dreams, which often have Yami and Noah in them. They sit in the sun and talk of peaceful things, sometimes Yami sits on his lap and they watch the sunrise together.

Seto seems to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the pain is gone. He's not bored, he has no desire for conversation or distraction. He merely desires to be alone, not hurt or questioned, to have enough to eat, to be clean, that is completely satisfying. He lies quietly on the bed and feels his strength grow. It's established beyond a doubt that he's gaining weight, his thighs are thicker than his ankles and almost as his knees! He hasn't been this healthy in a long time.

Reluctantly at first, he begins exercising. He can walk three miles a day, measured by pacing the cell. His bowed shoulders grow straighter. He attempts other exercises, and is humiliated to find out what he can't do. He can't run, can't lift his arms or anything heavy to arms length. He can't stand on one leg without falling over. He can't do a push-up. He tries, but it's hopeless.

But then, finally, he accomplishes it. A time comes when he can even run the span of his cell six times consecutively! He begins to grow proud of his body, and though he doesn't have a mirror, believes his face is growing back to normal.

His mind grows more active. He sits down on his bed and works at reeducating himself.

He realises that his diary was read the day he wrote it. They had simply carefully replaced the spec of dust he'd left there. And they were right to do so. KaibaCorp is right. How can the immortal, collective mind be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity is statistical. It's merely a question of learning to think as they think.

_Control with love._

He thinks. Then immedaitely he thinks.

_Two and two make five._

But then his mind, as though retreating from an internal battle, is unable to concentrate. He writes:

_Power decides reality._

He acceps everything. The past is alterable. Domino is at war with The Koreas. Domino has always been at war with The Koreas. Gozaburo won a chess game against Seto and adopted him. There was never a document which disproved this. It never existed, he invented it. He remembers contrary things, but those are false memories. They are products of self-deception.

How easy it all is! Surrender, and everything gets better. He hardly knows why he ever rebelled. Everything is easy. Except-!

But then, something bursts in Seto's mind. _Noah said he could make himself levitate. So I think of him doing it, then I think I see him doing it. But I don't really see it. It's a hallcunation. It's not really happening._ But he gets rid of the thought instantly. The fallacy is obvious: there is no 'real' world where 'real' things happen. All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in the mind, truly happens.

But then he realises that the thought itself, although he can suppress it, shouldn't happen in the first place. He shouldn't have any dangerous thoughts. He must makes such thought an impossibility. _Crimestop,_ it's called in Newspeak.

Seto begins educating himself in _crimestop_. He presents himself with a set of prepositions - KaibaCorp says that ice is heavier than water, KaibaCorp says the Earth is flat - and trains himself in not seeing or understanding the arguments that contradicts them. Ice floats in water, which means it should be lighter. But! It also breaks the surgace tension, and what is the force of the mass of water than its surface tension? Therefore, ice _is_ heavier and KaibaCorp was right!

It isn't easy to think this way, to change one's standards of evidence for everything. Stupidity is as difficult to attain as intelligence.

All the while, he wonders how soon they'll shoot him. He knows there's no conscious act that could bring that date closer. It might be ten minutes, or ten years. They might keep him for years in solitary confinement, they might release him for a while, as they sometimes do. The one thing certain is that death never comes at an expected moment. It's unspoken, but somehow he knows it - they shoot you in the back of the head as you walk down a corridor.

Seto suddenly realises, with horror, that he's been speaking aloud.

"Yami, my love... Yami..."

For a minute Seto has an overwheling hallucination of his presence. Yami isn't just with him, he's inside him. In this moment, he loves Yami more than he ever did when they were together and free. Also, he knows that somewhere or another, Yami is alive and needs his help. 

"Yami, I love you!" 

He lies back in bed and tries to stop himsefl from crying. _What have I done?_ How many years has he added onto his sentence with that momentary slip of judgement.

For the first time, Seto perceives that if he wants to keep a secret from the Thought Police, he must also keep it from himself. He must know that it's there, but he must never let it emerge into his consciousness in any shape that can be given a name. From now on he must not only think right: he must feel right and dream right. He must keep his hatred for KaibaCorp locked up inside him, part of himself yet unconnected from the rest of him.

One day, they'll decide to shoot him. For a few seconds beforehand, it'll be possible to guess. It's always from behind, always down a corridor. Ten seconds will be enough. To make as much impact as possible, Seto must knew beforehand. He hatches a plan.

Hatred will fill him like an enormous roaring flame. And in an insant, _bang!_ will go the bullet. An instant too late. KaibaCorp won't be able to reclaim his thoughts. He'll think the most dreaful thing and it'll go unpunished, unrepented. He'll be out of their reach forever. They'll blow a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them is freedom.

What's the most deplorable thing of all? He thinks of Gozaburo Kaiba. The enormous face with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that follow you.

There's a heavy clang at the door. Noah walks into the cell.

"Get up," says Noah. "Come here,"

Seto stands opposite Noah. Noah looks at him closely.

"You have thought of deceiving me. That was stupid. Tell me - and no lies, I am always able to detect when you re lying - what are your true feelings towards Gozaburo Kaiba?"

"I hate him,"

"You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Gozaburo Kaiba. You must not only obey him: you must love him,"

He pushes Seto towards the guards.

"Floor Minus 101,"


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning - graphic chapter

_All of humanity crumbles equally under the hand of the torturer._

~~~

Floor Minus 101 is many metres below the ground, as deep as it's possible to go.

It's bigger than most of the cells he's been in, but he barely notices the surroundings. All he notices is a long metal sheet, like the one he lay on when he first arrived, and a large bowl underneath with a contraption to hold your head. The entire thing looks like a big ice cream scoop. He is strapped onto the bench with those thick iron rods again. A sort of pad makes it so he cannot move his head, it just sits rigidly above the bowl.

"You asked me once," Noah begins. "-what is on Floor Minus 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. What is on Floor Minus 101 is the worst thing in the world,"

A doctor in a white coat comes in and places a sort of wire mesh over Seto's mouth, connecting it to the pad so that a wire grate covers his entire face. It holds his mouth open, a barred cage across his face that wrenches his jaw apart.

"The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual," Noah explains. "It might be being buried alive, or death by fire, or impalement, or hundreds of other possibilities. There are cases when it is some trivial thing, not even fatal,"

Seto sees that on a table by the wall is a large metal basin. The doctor picks it up and brings it over. He hears the unmistakable sound of water sloshing inside it.

"In your case," Noah smiles down at him. "the worst thing in the world happens to be water," 

A premonitory tremor passes through Seto. But as this moment, the meaning of the cage-like mask he's wearing sinks in.

"You can't do that!" he cries out in a high, cracked voice. "You couldn't, you couldn't! It's impossible!"

"Do you remember," Noah sighs. "The moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? That wall of blackness was a wall of water. The waterfall. You knew what it was, yet you did not dare drag it into the open,"

"Noah!" Seto makes an effort to control his voice. "You know this is not necessary. What is it you want me to do? I'll do anything!"

Noah gives no direct answer. Instead, he explains the existence of the floor itself. "Floor Minus 101 exists for people like you or Kiryu Kyosuke. For people like you, pain is not always enough. There are people who can endure pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable - something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch a rope. It you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It's merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed. For you, the thought of water is unendurable. It is a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you,"

"But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?!"

Noah lifts the bucket over Seto's head. He can hear the blood ringing in his ears. He has the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. It's an enormous tank of water.

"Hundreds of years ago, there was a decree passed. The form of torture we are about to perform - waterboarding, it was called - was outlawed by international law. Even a society as primitive and ruthless as the 21st century knew this torture was unbearable for even the most hardened soldier. You are not simply convinced you are drowning under waterboarding. You _are_ drowning. Water trickles into your lungs and you choke on it. As someone who is afraid of water, Seto, you are helpless,"

Noah moves the tank closer. It's less than a metre from Seto's face. He makes a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the sheet. It's hopeless, every part of him, including his head, is held immovably. The tank draws nearer, it's closing in. And suddenly, a drip-drip-dripping falls through the grate covering his mouth. He can't swallow in time, doesn't think to do so.

Seto fights furiously against his panic. To think is his only hope. Suddenly, a drop of water gets lodged in his throat and he chokes on it, his throat snaps closed in terror. _Drip. Drip. Drip._ There's a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, for a moment he loses consciousness. Everything goes black. _Drip. Drip. Drip._ For an instant he is insane, a screaming animal. Yet he comes out of the blackness clutching an idea. There is only one way to save himself. As his parents sacrificed themselves to that waterfall, Seto must sacrifice someone else to this torrent. _Drip. Drip. Drip._

The fear of getting water in his eyes makes him squeeze them shut. There are no thoughts of anything but the water. _Drip. Drip. Drip._ His lungs fill with fluid, he is drowning, slowly. Dying, slowly. Again, the black panic takes hold of him. He's blind, helpless, mindless.

"This was a common torture technique employed by America against suspected terrorists," says Noah as didactically as ever.

 _Drip. Drip. Drip._ An idea, a tiny fragment of hope comes to Seto's mind. It's too late, perhaps too late. But he suddenly understands that there's just one person he could transfer his punishment to - one person he can sacrifice to the water. And he gargles frantically, unaware if his voice is even audible. _Drip. Drip. Drip._

"Do it to Yami! Do it to Yami! Not me! Yami! Not me, Yami! Not me!"

He's falling backwards, into enormous depths. Into a river, under the waterfall. He's still strapped to the sheet, but he's fallen through the walls of the building, through the Earth, through the oceans. But Noah is still standing at his side. There is still the cold, wire grate against his face. But through the darkness that has enveloped him there's the sound of sloshing water, and the entire contents of the tank are suddenly poured onto his face, down his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Question - I have two endings to this story. The main ending, but I've written an alternative ending in which Seto and Yami escape. Do you want me to upload the alternative ending too or nah?


	25. The End

_The man who plays chess with himself always beats his opponent._

~~~

Foor 120 is one of the poorest floors in KaibaCorp, and Seto's new home as a proletariat. It's almost empty, a lonely hour of the night as darkness streams in from the outside world. A strange, tinny war anthem trickles through the cyberscreen.

Seto sits in his usual corner of the corridor, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again, he glances up at the vast face which stares at him from the oppsite wall. _GOZABURO KAIBA IS WATCHING YOU_ , it reads. Every so often, Seto fills his glass with _VODKA_. Despite having the entire bottle, he makes a point if pouring it into a glass before he drinks. Because Seto is classy. 

Seto listens to the cyberscreens. There might be a military bulletin soon. A London army ( _Domino is at war with London: Domino has always been at war with London_ ) is coming towards them at a terrifying speed. For the first time in the whole war, Domino itself is under attack.

Seto stops thinking about the war. Since Floor Minus 101, he can never fix his mind on one subject for more than a few moments at a time. He picks up the glass and drains it in a gulp. As always, it makes him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff is horrible. The clear vodka is mixed up in his mind with the look of that-

_Water._

He never names it, even in his thoughts. So far as possible, he never visualises it. He hasn't had a bath, a face wash, a drink of water since then. Seto looks down at his chessboard, trying to solve a difficult problem. He got it form the black market. He gets everything there most days, and doesn't count his tab. Sometimes, the smugglers occasionally ask for a payment, but Seto has the impression that they always undercharge him. He is no longer a journalist, no longer has access to any of the floors he used to call home. He's been left to die down here.

He examines his chess problem and sets out the pieces. It's a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. "White to play and mate in two moves," he states to himself, setting himself a challenge. He looks up at the portrait of Gozaburo Kaiba. The huge face gazes back at him, full of calm power.

There's an announcement from the cyberscreen, telling everyone to standby for an update on the frontier at fifteen-thirty.

He picks up the white knight and moves it across the board.

If London gets control of The Koreas, it could destroy Domino. It might mean anything - defeat, breakdown, the redividsion of the world - the destruction fo KaibaCorp! He draws a deep breath. Feelings struggle inside of him. 

The spasm passes. He puts the white knight back in its place, but for a moment he can't settle down to seriously study the chess problem. His thoughts wander again. Almost unconsciously, he traces the dust with his finger on the floor.

_2 + 2 = 5_

Yami had told him that KaibaCorp can't get inside him. But they have. They have done things to him from which he cannot recover. Something was killed in his body: brunt out, cauterised out.

He looks up, Yami is standing before him. Seto stands up too. He puts his dirtied, bloody arm around Yami's waist.

They walk to the staircase. There's no cyberscreen, but there must be hidden microphones. Besides, they could be seen. It doesn't matter, nothing matters. They could make love right now if they wanted to. Seto freezes at the horror of that thought. Yami makes no response whatsoever to the clasp of his arm. He sees now what has changed in Yami.

Across Yami's head is a deep, long scar that runs from his cheek across his temples. His waist is not only thicker, but stiffer. Yami's body now feels like his legs had felt, and it occurs to Seto that Yami's entire torso has been replaced by a bionic system of mechanical parts, working in quick sucession to deliver all his biological needs. He's almost fully mechanical. Seto was given the same option upon his release, and declined.

He doesn't attempt to kiss Yami. They walk down the corridor a little and the duelist looks at him for the first time. It's only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. Seto wonders if it's contempt for the past or simply because Yami knows that Seto betrayed him. 

"I betrayed you," Yami says, his voice emotionless.

"I betrayed you," Seto says.

"Sometimes," Yami begins. "They threaten you with something you can't stand up to. Can't even think about. And you say 'Don't do it to me, do it to-'. And you think there's no other way of saving yourself. You're ready to save yourself that way. You don't give a damn who suffers. All you can think about is yourself,"

"All you can think about is yourself," Seto echoes.

"And you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer,"

"No," he sighs. "You don't feel the same,"

It's embarrassing to stand in silence. Seto starts to feel awkward, tearing his eyes away from Yami and staring at the floor instead. "We must meet again," Seto states.

"Yes," Yami smiles. "We must meet again,"

They walk for a distance. They don't speak again. Seto has a nostalgic vision of the chessboard he was just using, and looks back at it. It seems pointless to follow Yami to the top of the staircase simply to be unable to follow him higher, as the partisan prevents him from accessing the next floor without documents. 

"Are you still a duelist?" Seto asks by the entrance to the stairwell.

"Yes," Yami smiles. "Too many people have too many memories of me to make me disappear. But I'm no longer the number one. I no longer represent KaibaCorp,"

"I'm sorry to hear that," Seto pouts. He realises there's nothing more to say and turns to go in the other direction, but a hand grabs his wrist.

"I betrayed you, but I do not hate you," Yami looks into his eyes, pleadingly.

"I love you too," Seto says. He can say that aloud to the microphones, he has nothing to lose now.

Yami just nods slightly and makes for the staircase.

Seto goes back to his chessboard, interested in it once again. He picks up the white knight and makes a tentative move. Checkmate. But it's evidently not the right move, because -

Seto is troubled by a memory. A bright room in a low building surrounded by a lush garden. He sat at the table with Mokuba, who must have been only five. They played chess, and the other kids, even the bullies, cheered them on each game. Seto won every time, but Mokuba still smiled.

He pushes the memory away. It's a false memory because it's before KaibaCorp, and nothing came before KaibaCorp.

He turns back to the chessboard and picks up the white knight again. He moves it again, but now white has been mated by black. A folly? Seto smiles and stands up, kicking over his chessboard. White must always win. 

He walks.

He walks down the corridor, empty now. His eyes close, and he stops. He stops in the centre of the corridor. Just for an instant. But an instant is enough for him. He takes a step.

_Ten._

On the other side of the gun, an instant is enough for Noah's eyes to widen slightly. He puts the pieces together in his mind. He knows what just happened. He knows what Seto just did. 

_Nine._

Seto takes another step. The sniper places his finger on the trigger. Noah bites his lip worriedly, feeling the pressure of the Big Five on his shoulders to make this a sucess. What is Seto planning, if anything?

_Eight._

Step.

_Seven._

Step.

_Six._

Step.

_Five._

Seto stops again. He reists the urge to turn around and look at Noah, to confirm the worries he knows are buzzing around the cyborg's head. But that's premature, Noah could still stop the sniper and arrest him again. 

_Four._

_Three._

_Two._

The sniper's finger is on the trigger.

"Wait!" Noah cires out, but it's too late. The sniper is startled by the shout and the bullet flies through the air.

Seto takes the deepest possible breath. He has the feeling of walking in sunlight. In his last moment, he screams.

"DOWN WITH GOZABURO KAI-!"

The long-hoped-for bullet enters his brain.

Noah watches the body drop. Seto is dead, but it doesn't matter. _He did it._ With the utterance of those words, the existence of the thought, Seto has projected it into the open without fear. He didn't have to hide, to hold back. Thoughtcrime didn't exist in his mind. He simply screamed the heresy without consequence.

With that scream, with that thought, with that concept in existence, Noah Kaiba knows.

"KaibaCorp is defeated," he smiles openly, a smile he no longer has to hide even from himself. "Humanity has won,"

*

**I loved writing this, it's been one of my favourite projects to work on. I'm sad that it's over, but it'll admit this was difficult to make. I struggled with the ending a lot. I initially planned on ending with Kaiba and Yami reconciling, re-confessing their love and beating KaibaCorp that way, but I also always intended to end this book on Seto's death. I hope it wasn't disappointing. There will be an alternative ending in the next chapter, so you can decide which ending you like more and have that be your ending!**

**Please leave a kudos and a comment if you like, I always want to improve!**


	26. Chapter 25 (Alternative Ending)

_Authority is always unsustainable because humanity triumphs over such societal structures._

~~~

After Seto is released from Noah's confinement, he returns to his apartment. A picture of Gozaburo Kaiba stares down at him from the wall. He kneels and begs its forgiveness, praise from the cyberscreen ruining the silence. Those acidic eyes stare down at him, unyielding, merciless. They're nothing like Noah's eyes. Noah's eyes, while previously were sympathetic and understanding, now terrify him so much that he runs to the toilet and throws up his guts into it.

Where is that strange sound coming from? Seto walks to his door and pulls it open. A figure he recognises is there. Yami. He stiffens up, eyes and limbs fixed in place like an old, rusted robot. A robot left to rust in water. Water, that dreaded, consuming wall of terror that separates him from Yami. To reach Yami, he must get through the water - an impossible task.

"Seto," hands cover his own. Hands warmer than his. "Come on, we don't have much time,"

Only now does Seto realise that the strange sound wasn't Yami knocking on the door, but an alarm ululating throughout all of KaibaCorp. He looks around, his mind a frenzy of confusion, frenetic and contradictory thoughts raging throughout him. He loves Gozaburo Kaiba, but Yami has truly captured his heart. Yami doesn't wait for Seto to gather his thoughts before pulling him down the corridor towards the staircase.

For the first time since being released, Seto finds himself in the proletariat floors of KaibaCorp. Yami continues to drag him despite his struggles, his pleas. "I love Gozauro Kaiba! Let me go! Guards!"

"The guards aren't coming for you, Seto,"

"Why, why not?!" he stops struggling so hard, allowing Yami's voice to replace Gozaburo's dogma in his mind.

"Because, Seto, they're busy searching for Noah's killer,"

Seto stops in an instant, forcibly yanking Yami back to his spot. His eyes glaze over, and for a moment, he recognises what has happened to him. He lost himself and was replaced by Gozaburo Kaiba. But now, his face is overcome by a grin. "Too bad, I liked him," E

Yami's eyes dance with jubilance. "Is that you? The real you, are you back?"

As if to answer, Seto starts running again, this time side-by-side with Yami.

Everything comes back to Seto, with each step he makes of his own volition. The fact that Yami is here with him shows that the betrayal was meaningless. Noah got in his head but couldn't remove his love for Yami. His survival instinct against that water didn't replace that love, it only superseded it. And that's okay because the love is still there.

Adrenaline spikes in his veins, an emotional outburst of hope, love, scepticism, and most of all hate. Hate for Gozaburo Kaiba, hate for Noah, hate for KaibaCorp.

They reach the lowest floors that exist above ground, called The Mines. The Mines, as most KC residents know, are where those who commit petty crimes are sentences, crimes such as buying things off the black market and not completing your daily workload to a satisfactory degree. Yami leads him to a line cart, positions on black metal tracks. Looking around, Seto sees large tubes forcing strange glowing liquid from the ground. Then he realises that The Mines aren't mining natural resources from underground - they're pushing KaibaCorp's waste up to the surface.

"What... is this?"

"They're poisoning the outside world," Yami explains. "Now get in the cart,"

A dangerous thing to do, but Seto trusts Yami. Yami enters too, pulling back a level to start the wheels. The cart begins to roll down the tracks and Yami opens its keypad.

"What are you doing?"

He presses the pad to hack into the control panel., changing the cart's course to avoid detection by the customs scan. By about the middle of their journey, Yami throws a carbon blanket over them and they huddle underneath, passing through a scanner. This must be how things are smuggled in and out on the black market. Eventually, the cart stops, and Seto huddles still under the blanket. Until it's ripped off of him and replaced by blinding light.

He steps out the cart and for the first time in years, his feet hit natural Earth. Refreshing lemon air blows against his face and his legs carry themselves. All he can do is run. Soon, he realises his feet aren't making any sound, as they're drowned out by his own screaming. He falls to the ground, staring at the sky above him and laughing, finally feeling free. A hand appears on his shoulder and a body lies down next to him. Yami.

Turning to him, Seto realises how beautiful he looks when hit by natural light. Astounded, Seto leans forward and kisses his softer lips. Seto feels the dirt on his back, euphoric. He has spent his entire life in a city-sized building and all he wants is to find anther building - the orphanage he grew up in.

They walk down the streets lined by dilapidated buildings, crumbling ruins of factories and homes and information hubs. As if each building had an internal nuclear fallout. He lets his hand hang by his side and feels Yami slip his hand into Seto's. He smiles and comes upon an urban bridge overlooking what was once a wide lake.

"We're close," he nods in admiration, picking up his pace towards the less modern, more destroyed part of Domino.

Rotting, dead trees curls around the entranceway to the orphanage. The one-storey, white building sends Seto back to a brown-toned, faded memory. A memory of older, tougher kids stealing Mokuba's toy. They held it topo high for the short boy, just out of reach. They laughed and made him cry. Seto remembers shouting, full of rage. He remembers jumping on them, ambivalent about Mokuba's toy but enraged that they laughed at him. He punched the oldest, biggest boy, breaking his nose. Blood soaked into the grass, saturating the soil as a rotting corpse does.

Seto stands in the same spot he attacked that boy.

He walks up to the door to the orphanage and knocks. The elderly patron answers with wide, eyes.

"Seto!" he smiles, recognising him. "We always watch your broadcasts here, we never thought you'd return!"

Seto smiles sympathetically. Once news hits The Big Five that he's escaped along with Yami, his broadcasts will be wiped from the record and he'll be rendered an unperson. Nobody will remember he exists.

"Can I see my old room?" Seto asks, and the patron obliges. It's a storage closet now, full of old books and random knickknacks from adopted or long-dead residents. He finds his old dresser drawer and opens the top drawer, inside is a picture of him and Mokuba. He starts crying silently and holds the picture against his heart. The picture depicts the last time Mokuba was innocent.

*

In December of 2985, KaibaCorp falls. With Yami and Seto leading the revolution from the outside, they exposed the Big Five and Gozaburo to the outsiders. Peace and humanity reign stronger than they ever have. People can do, but most importantly _think_ , what they want without fear. All prisoners are released from the underground floors of KaibaCorp and from The Mines. And the new society is run by the most unlikely married couple - an unperson and a cyborg.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was unique in this story in that it was completely of my own creation. It wasn't inspired by the ending of 1984 itself, it didn't follow that exact same structure. This was written a lot more authentically to how I write. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed what was difficult yet rewarding project for me to write.


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